I'm not sure if CBS thought Love Monkey bit off a little more than the audience could chew (since it was almost immediately canceled), but a marathon of only 8 episodes had me so dizzy from continual fast paced dialogue that I almost gave up and just turned it into an actor spotting sport. For example, Ivana Milisevic from The 100 was in Love Monkey. She's a badass, so that totally kept me watching. If you go on a Love Monkey bender, prepare to brake for IMDb lookups.
Thankfully, I did a little more research than that and then went back to it with fresh eyes, and actually quite liked it, although I'll have a little commentary on what I think happened with the ratings. I actually wound up liking it way better than most friend group shows I've avoided through the years, mostly because it wasn't dumbed down with a laugh track and had intelligent dialogue, and I wound up going back and rewatching the whole thing because I appreciated that.
Do people prefer sitcoms with laugh tracks or without? 👈(click)
Quick heads up for occasional extremely slow fadeouts. Extremely. Slow.
Love Monkey was actually reimagined from a novel of the same name, although quite a few changes were made for the TV series. The original novel was written by, of all people, a film critic, but the TV series drastically spiffs up our main character Tom (played by Tom Cavanagh, so we have Tom the actor and Tom the character) with a much cooler job (that needed too much narration to establish) and apparently a better body, so if the high paced dialogue content and jumpy scene transitions are too head spinny, you can always go chill with the book and feel sorry for pudgy Tom at the tabloid. If pretty Tom the actor as handsome Tom the character with a real life and a cool job at a record label can't launch this story all spiffed up, pretty sure pudgy Tom the book character can't win over Julia. I could be wrong, I haven't read it. And then the music biz stuff in the TV show was a bit busy, although it did hold its story integrity. Any kind of talent scouting is rigorous in its own right, so building a 'friend show' around that kind of a job was probably a little grueling. When I found out the original Tom character was working at a tabloid in the novel, I just shook my head. The leap to TV idealism was possibly a bit overdone.
I don't usually have concerns over content cramming in TV shows, but each segment in Love Monkeys was power packed with content, and if the content switching between scenes had been as slow as the fadeouts, it might have kept those 2M viewers that dropped off. Just having to stay alert enough through every episode to transition with scene changes felt a lot like watching high school basketball from mid point floor bleacher, lot of head swiveling trying to follow the ball. I felt like the scenes could have been paced out a little bit, possibly 8 eps could have been 16. It made the friend group feel a little too tight. Otherwise the show itself was really good, in my opinion, and I don't say that lightly for these kinds of shows. Maybe the timing was off or something, like Mystery Men.
Speaking of basketball, my favorite scenes in Love Monkey were the basketball scenes. I say this as a person who has seen the Harlem Globetrotters twice, watched a lot of college basketball on TV, sat by Jackie Crawford in my chemistry class, and had a daughter on high school varsity. I never even noticed Tom Cavanagh before The Flash, but I'd definitely watch him in a movie about basketball.
Star of Ed knows way around court- "During the late 1980s, the six-foot guard played for five years at the Canadian intercollegiate level while attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ont."
Getting back around to Love Monkey, my most basic basic takeaway is that Tom the character hits a sort of self revelation through a song an undiscovered young man is singing in a local bar/lounge/dance something, and suddenly realizes that song is about his own love life. Since he's a music scout for a record label, it's natural for him to scoop up talent, but in this case he winds up entangling the way the lyrics bring out his feels, coincidentally about the time he begins a new life with a new label after being fired from the original, ironically timed with his incompatible girlfriend (whose singing sucks) dumping him because he's as clueless as my own husband (I actually find that endearing, I kept my husband), inspiring his friends to push him to go find 'the one', his "Mrs. Tom".
In Facebook speak, it's complicated.
And that's probably the best way to review Love Monkey. It's complicated.
But my goal is to find out whether Tom Cavanagh shaves or brushes his teeth in this show, so I committed to searching out free fan sharing, which was thankfully most of it, bless fandom hearts, so it's not exactly definitive, but I submit that it can still be conclusive, based on what I could find. Which was most of it. If Tom shaved or brushed his teeth in any of the missing segments in the seventh episode, I'm going to be very disappointed in fandom fail when I find out. If you'd like to catch up on this series, it's been on youtube for about 12 years now. (:edit: Since I published this review, nearly everything in this playlist has disappeared and I don't know why, but I'm going to guess because I highlighted a free collection that irked the youtube police. Sorry about that.)
Other than a few minor editing problems, though, the story was actually pretty intriguing. Nearly every scene I was making bets what Tom the character would do or say next, along with his friends, apparently. They knew him well. This is kind of where the show hooked me and reeled me in, because I've never had a little coterie of friends synch bombing me on pronoun usage, so when they got to 'her' vs 'it', I discovered I was already on the stringer and stopped fighting it. I admit I downloaded this series.
You guys realize I'm making this longer so I can slide in more screenshots, right. This is a Tom watch, after all. You're welcome. (If you follow Tom Cavanagh around filming just to gaze on him, this series is perfect for you. It's full of costume and scene changes highlighting main actor.)
I'll be honest, when I first started this review, it was more along the lines of What are the writers doing to me?, hence the title. Because I'm horrible for judging other writers harshly, particularly when they are working on big money projects, I've gotta be honest and say Love Monkey the TV series was way too content crammed for the average person coming home after work wanting to relax into some entertainment, and I think the way the scripts were jammed into the filming style is what killed it. When I'm watching a scene in a public area where two characters are talking, I don't want to see a fuzzy closeup of someone's head walking through spoiling the shot. Many of the scene backgrounds were so 'busy' with detail or extraneous movement that needed to be filtered back out that it became work to watch the show. For me, a person who doesn't filter detail well, and I suspect there are plenty of us (since 2M viewers dropped off so immediately), Love Monkey quickly became a grind through high speed content filtering in order to follow the story. Between the script writing and film editing, I nearly jumped off this train myself. This is a good story. Perhaps the storytelling method itself could have been reimagined.
This is the song that inspired the storytelling narrative in the TV series. 👉click for lyrics👈 Find more Teddy Geiger on youtube. The original novel title "Love Monkey" was inspired by an unrelated song lyric.
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