A hallmark of Bill Lawrence’s 30 years of producing TV comedies is his skill at handling large casts and the ability to give characters personal idiosyncrasies through dialogue alone. It’s rare that he has supporting characters who aren’t developed beyond the first impression they give, and he often gives those characters their own story. Journalist and author Carl Hiaasen is also known for creating stories with lots of quirky characters, so it’ll be interesting to see how Lawrence handles adapting one of Hiaasen’s novels for a TV series.

EVIL MONKEY: STREAM OR SKIP?

Opening shot: “So that’s the thing about fishing stories. They always start on a boat,” says a narrator. Then we pan up and see a boat in the water; Tom Petty’s “American Girl” is playing.

The essentials: The narrator is Captain Fitzgerald (Tom Nowicki), the captain of a fishing boat that lures tourists off the Florida Keys. While a man is deep sea fishing on his honeymoon, he pulls ashore what he thinks is a giant marlin, but it turns out to be a severed arm with a wedding ring and raised middle finger.

Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) is a man of simple needs, says the narrator. A good view, a drink and, well, that’s about it. He’s a police detective in the Keys, but is currently suspended, so he hangs out at his waterfront home and bemoans the huge, ugly house being built next door. His former partner Rogelio Burton (John Ortiz) finds him and tells him the sheriff wants him to take the severed arm to Miami to see if it came from one of their cases. Rogelio believes any favor Andrew does for him will help him get back on the job.

Andrew takes the arm to the coroner’s office in Miami, where he also used to work as a police detective. There he meets Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), a medical examiner with whom he gets along well and who is happy to grab a mango ice cream from the cooler the arm is in. The arm could have been ripped off by a propeller or broken off by a shark, but it doesn’t match anyone in her morgue.

Rogelio surprisingly encourages Andrew to throw the arm into the alligator-filled canal, but Andrew keeps the arm because he feels there is more to this story. Bonnie Witt (Michelle Monaghan), who Andrew is dating despite being married, sees the arm and runs away. When a woman reports that her husband has gone missing, Andrew is tasked with returning the arm to her. However, instead of simply giving the arm to Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), Andrew asks her a lot of questions. This angers the sheriff and leads to Andrew being fired.

We also follow the plight of Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), whose fishing lodge in the Bahamas is threatened by a resort developer. He goes to the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), a local woman who practices Obeah, to curse the developer, even though he doesn’t necessarily believe in such a thing.

What shows will it remind you of? Bill Lawrence created Evil Monkeybased on the 2013 novel of the same name by Carl Hiaasen; he wrote the screenplay for the first episode. Lawrence’s style, which we have seen for almost 30 years in shows by Spin City To Scrubs To Ted Lasso To shrinkageis present here. But the setting of the show is also reminiscent of the Netflix series Florida Manas well as Netflix’s first dramatic twists set in the Keys, Bloodline.

Our opinion: There are many layers Evil Monkey which we did not discuss in the “Gist” section of the review. As with many of Hiaasen’s stories, the characters take precedence, and Evil Monkey has many of them. Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence) is Eve’s stepdaughter and she is convinced that Eve killed her father. Eve has a boyfriend named Christopher (Rob Delaney) who has ties to what is going on in the Bahamas. While he is investigating the arm, Andrew is at war with Evan Shook (Alex Moffat), the developer building the eyesore next to his house.

So there is a lot going on, including people getting shot and other mysterious things happening. Still, Lawrence and his writers make sure that the viewer is not thrown into the middle of a storm of the story. The use of narrative style is something that Lawrence uses to great effect in Scrubsand having Captain Fitzgerald offer his gruff observations on what’s going on helps. We’re not usually fans of constant narration in a show. But since the story takes place in two different locations, having Fitzgerald jump in and lead us from one place to another keeps things from getting too confusing.

Vaughn is a perfect fit with Andrew Yancey, and Lawrence and his writers like Vaughn’s casual acting style. Vaughn often sounds like he’s improvising when he’s in projects, as he strikes a loose but quick tone that fits Lawrence’s script well. The rest of the cast needs to define themselves a bit more, though we enjoy seeing Peet with Crystal, who plays Neville’s monkey Driggs.

Sex and skin: Andrew and Bonnie have sex in the shower, but there is no real nudity.

Farewell shot: Fitzgerald, the narrator, reveals that the stories he is telling are actually connected as we see Christopher stepping out of a seaplane while Neville watches. The ending is confusing, however, because we are seeing Christopher for the first time up to this point and have no idea how he is connected to the Florida part of the story.

Sleepy Star: We always root for Natalie Martinez, who we like as an actress but seems to end up in a lot of flop projects. She’s a lot of fun here as Rosa, who will likely be Andrew’s investigative partner and possible love interest. Martinez has pretty good chemistry with Vaughn. Also: This might be the first time Charlotte Lawrence has starred in one of her father’s shows, and we’ve liked what we’ve seen so far.

Most pilot-y lines: Andrew scrapes the ice cream off his arm as it appears to have frozen to the bottom of his freezer. You’d think he’d put it in a bag, but then it wouldn’t have been as funny to see.

Our call: STREAM IT. Evil Monkey has a bit of a shaggy feel to it, with the potential to go off in many different directions and a lot of characters to keep track of. But if anyone can nail a show like this, it’s Lawrence and his crew.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but he makes no mistake: He is a TV junkie. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.