The biggest TV shows right now on Apple TV+, Netflix, Hulu, and more
By Andy Meek,
2024-08-24
Apple TV+’s new Bad Monkey is one of the biggest TV shows on all of streaming right now — the actual biggest, by one measure — and, honestly, it doesn’t surprise me a bit.
Bad Monkey is kind of like the Florida Man of TV shows. It’s unique. It’s completely over the top. It’s as if sun-baked coastal excess was repackaged into the format of a TV show, complete with bright splashes of tropical color, wacky characters, and a motormouthed protagonist who could only exist in the Sunshine State. You watch a show like this for the same reason a person visits Palm Beach — for the vibes, baby! (okay, and maybe those waterfront views, too).
The new Apple show , based on Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel of the same name, stars Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, a former Miami police detective who now works as a health inspector in the Florida Keys after pissing off the wrong people. Just to give you an idea of what a, let’s say, colorful show this is — it opens with a tourist fisherman discovering a severed arm floating in the water, the middle finger of which is still hilariously extended thanks to some bizarre rigor mortis. You only have to wait a few episodes to find out who the arm belonged to, but … yeah.
According to the streaming search engine Reelgood , Bad Monkey is the #1 show across all of streaming this week. “Two episodes through, consider me a big fan of Apple TV’s Bad Monkey ,” raved @CinemaTweets1 on X/Twitter. “Between Sugar , Presumed Innocent , and now Bad Monkey , Apple’s been dishing out high quality shows throughout 2024.”
Indeed. Moreover, the show is currently sitting at a 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 92% critics’ score, which is not bad at all for creator Bill Lawrence’s third Apple TV+ series (after Ted Lasso and Shrinking ). Reelgood, by the way, monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US, from Apple TV+ to Max , Disney+ , Hulu , Netflix , Prime Video , Paramount+ and more.
For the 7-day period that ended on Aug. 21, the 10 TV shows that topped Reelgood’s latest weekly ranking are as follows:
I’ve got to say: As outlandish as Bad Monkey is, it’s super-entertaining. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Lawrence’s TV output over the course of his career (going all the way back to NBC’s Scrubs ) is among the most consistently enjoyable fare that I’ve ever encountered from a TV creator.
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