3 out of 5

Created by: Donald Todd

A quality noir with some truly solid performances and character arcs, ‘Florida Man’s story occasionally gets bogged down by its misplaced tone, some overly-complicated plotting, and a rather unnecessary linking to the internet meme of its title.

Ex-cop Mike Valentine (Édgar Ramírez) has a gambling problem, which has put him in debt – payed off via employment as a fixer – to bumbling but dangerous small-time mobster Moss Yankov (Emory Cohen). When Yankov’s girlfriend, Delly (Abbey West), disappears with a chunk of cash, Mike is sent to Florida to track her down. …This part of Florida also being where Mike’s sister and ex-cop father, Sunny (Anthony LaPaglia), live, and Delly disappearing to chase down a rumor on some buried pirate treasure, which Mike also has a line on. Interrelations prove to be more complex than at first glance; the treasure hunt becomes more and more complex as each step of its retrieval goes wrong; and a string of related murders swirling around Mike and Delly invites the attention of cops and the FBI and Yankov, all while Mike tries to sort out his relationship with Sunny, who might also be looking for the treasure.

While the pirate gold bit never quite feels like an organic aspect of the story, the general MacGuffin it provides works, and the stream of unfortunate coincidences and misunderstandings that spiral out from related schemings all work well – the amount of / lack of trust everyone has for each other never results in necessarily unbelievable choices, and I was surprised how invested I was in the deepening relationships between Mike and Delly and Mike’s family, all of whom grow immensely beyond their initially one-beat characterizations thanks to strong writing and performances in that regard. The writing is less successful in justifying the overly complex solutions people come up with to solve problems, but this is similar to the pirate gold, in that it forms a nice loop where the starting point is clunky, but what results from those points is solid.

This unevenness occurs in the series’ general tone as well, which perhaps started as taking the various Florida Man memes and creating an appropriate backdrop for them, but that creates a split between the darkly comic beats and a more absurd undertone, which flashes into the foreground rather distractingly here and there. So it’s something that may have been a jumping off idea, which grew into a larger (and better) story, only for that original idea / vibe to feel belted on to the other. Whether or not that’s how things came together, the divide exists.

Ramírez, West, and LaPaglia all follow an interesting progression in the series: Florida Man starts out in kind of a crass and sweaty mold, which lends itself to similar characterizations. I have to believe this is purposeful, as things open up much, much more as we go along, providing each actor platforms for some great performances; this structure does mean the opening eps give a certain impression, though, which might’ve informed some negative reviews.

From Jason Bateman’s Netflix production deal, it’s maybe logical to compare Florida Man to Ozark, a series which also struggled with tone, and I’d argue took a lot longer to get to the same level of strength Florida Man shows after a few episodes. They do each share a darkly comic, noir-informed story; FM never quite gets as complex – it is only 7 episodes – but I ultimately enjoyed it more, perhaps, with the story growing way past its meme influences, even if those were still largely a limiting factor.