Evil MonkeyApple TV+’s new Florida-set rogue series, starring Vince Vaughn as a cheeky cop, is a pretty good way to pass the time on TV, but it’s dragged down by one unfortunately bad element – and it’s not the devious monkey of the title.

Every time you get into the swing of things in this ten-part crime comedy, you are interrupted by an unnecessary narrator with banal interjections, awkward transitions or witty remarks in passing that just don’t land.

This gruff voice from off-screen – that of a fishing boat captain, played by Tom Nowicki and outside the plot – is the monkey on the back of Evil Monkeyan adaptation of a novel by Carl Hiaasen, which, like many of the former Miami Herald journalist’s books, is set in the seedy underworld of the Sunshine State.

The narrative may be attempting to capture the cynical voice of the author who has seen it all – or perhaps the writers were aiming for an opposite shore. The Big Lebowski Mood. Unfortunately, he comes across as more know-it-all than omniscient – and, worst of all, he constantly tries to dictate which characters you sympathize with in which scenes, instead of just letting you watch the chaos unfold in the Florida Keys and draw your own conclusions.

Well, I generally have nothing against narrators in television shows. The device has been used in comedic dramas with antiheroes as anchors such as Dexter And You (for a while anyway) – or in an unusual PI show like Veronica Mars.

But given the way Vaughan plays Detective Andrew Yancy, a suspended Florida Keys cop turned health inspector who can’t help but investigate a severed arm a tourist fished out of the water, this film simply isn’t necessary.

He’s no laconic cop: Yancy is a talkative Cathy, constantly firing off her own offhand and self-consciously funny comments about his life as he leads it, whether people are shooting at him or not.

In fact, Vaughan’s Yancy would be the ideal protagonist for a private detective thriller, cycling through the Keys like a cross between Jessica Fletcher and a giraffe.

Yancy is tasked with transporting the recovered arm between two police districts in Florida, neither of which wants to take on a case. He ends up investigating the case with the Miami coroner Rosa (Natalie Martinez) – with whom he immediately has serious Undeclared work Chemistry.

It turns out that the pendant belongs to a missing man whose wife, actress Eve – played by Meredith Hagner, who in Search party – doesn’t seem to be playing the role of the grieving widow quite right; the missing man’s daughter, Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence), suspects that she killed him for the insurance money.

In fact, Eve quickly invested her easy money in a resort on an island in the Bahamas run by a mysterious developer played by Rob Delaney, who is a perfect counterpart to Vaughan in both his comedic gifts and his size.

Cut to the Bahamas, where – well, if only Evil Monkey just cut off here. To give you a taste of the show’s overly explanatory voiceover, our narrator instead chimes in with this:

“Before I go any further here, I have to tell you a little story about a young man in the Bahamas,” he says. “I know it’s annoying to end this story just when it’s getting really exciting, but I promise it will make sense eventually.”

No, Mr. Narrator, no. It is not at all disturbing when a show shifts the focus from one character to another.

It’s annoying when you overvalue the fun the viewer is having at a given moment and then talk down to the viewer as if they’ve never seen a series with multiple storylines that eventually overlap.

But now I digress. … On the islands, Evil Monkey tells the story of Neville (Ronald Peet), who has a cute monkey as a companion and whose ancestral land is taken away from him by Eve.

He is atoning for a curse placed on him by a local Obeah practitioner called the Dragon Queen, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, who outshines the rest of the cast—and is the only character you’re ever likely to develop such affection for.

Everything else is light and airy, filled with sleazy real estate agents, romantic Russian mafiosi, philosophizing henchmen and, in a subplot that will make your head spin, True Detective“Michelle Monaghan” as a seductive sex offender.

Okay, this is another not so good element of Evil Monkey then. But there’s more than enough to make it the streaming equivalent of a secret beach read – if only there was a way to turn off Captain Obvious’ commentary.