Florida Man Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
A “meme,” according to Google, is an image, video, or text–often humorous–that internet users copy and broadcast with slight alteration. The Netflix series “Florida Man,” also a copy with slight alteration, gets inspiration from one such meme, which originated in Florida (a state of meme), that featured peculiar males (what else) doing peculiar things, not uncommon in Florida. Since one idea is as good as another, when ideas are hard to come by, as Netflix frequently demonstrates, this one will do.
Created by Donald Todd (creator of the ungrammatical “This is Us”), the series borrows its offbeat concept from similar crime-comedies (“crimedies”), by now familiar to regular Netflix subscribers. The Coen brothers conceived the original formula and passed it in to the world as a gesture of goodwill, like the Salk vaccine.
Essential to the formula are characters out of left field, way out, who sound like the places they’re from, who are as foolish and amusing as they appear, who say foolish and amusing things (sarcasm is a contagion), whose lives veer from the absurd to the ridiculous. Another essential part of the formula is the main character’s tortured childhood, revealed here in trite flashbacks (flashbacks are an inferior writer’s crutch), and in one distasteful group encounter, unsettling and out of place.
To anyone who likes movies, the premise of this rehash should be familiar. Taken from the 1984 crime drama “Against All Odds” (which was taken from the 1947 film noir “Out of the Past”), it involves a down-on-his luck man hired by a gangster to find his runaway girlfriend who stole from him: the man double crosses the gangster, to protect the girlfriend, and the girlfriend double crosses both of them, to protect her bank account. It’s common practice in the movie industry to capitalize on a success by stealing from it, with impunity, it seems, as there’s no statute of limitations on an idea in Hollywood, and apparently neither at Netflix.
While the cast of characters is familiar, the actors–other than a nearly unrecognizable Anthony LaPaglia–are not, although Edgar Ramirez and Abbey Lee could be body doubles for a younger Joaquin Phoenix and Heather Graham. And while the setting is Florida (it’s in the title after all), the actual location is North Carolina. In movies, it ought to be clear, nothing is what it seems, except what you’ve seen before.
