Mad Dogs Season 1 Review

At least through the first six hours, there are no monsters or master criminals hiding in the ranks of the foursome – just a lot of regrets, self-loathing and sense enough for them to know how completely screwed they probably are. Even in a situation this bizarre, every action gets filtered through a vicious cycle of insecurity and judgment that underpins many male relationships. As things spiral faster and further into chaos, the guys spend as much time credibly reacting to insane circumstances as they do pettily sniping at one another. You almost wish someone in the cast would falter or rise above the rest to give you an individual performance worth singling out, but the leads all capture different, relatable angles on autumn years angst, and how friendships require their own set of survival skills.

“Somehow we stumbled into this cosmic ****up,” Gus summarizes in the third episode, which nicely captures both the reflective nature of Mad Dogs at its quietest, and also the improbable turns the story often requires in order to keep the guys stuck in Belize. Given the plot’s Hitchcockian dependence on mistaken identities and endangered average Joes, it’s quite fitting that Cole and Ryan run the show with plenty of (occasionally somewhat literal) refrigerator logic.

If you sat down and thought about the logistics and motives behind everything that happens, you could probably see what a perilously brittle sandcastle the writers have built with Mad Dogs. But because we’re usually grounded in the self-involved perspective of the tourists, who believe more than anyone that the universe is out to get them, the coincidences keeping the show afloat don’t rankle all too much.

Further enticing you to suspend your disbelief is how effective Mad Dogs is as both frantic travelogue and wild farce. Any well-produced series set around the equator has a high likelihood of looking spectacular, so it’s no surprise that Mad Dogs is Amazon’s most visually pleasing show yet (though not quite its best directed). A gruesome plot doesn’t detract from the inviting scenery, and the show is at its most gut busting when leaning full-bore into gallows humor; it’s hard to think of another series that gets as much dramatic and comic mileage out of a single corpse as Mad Dogs does.

With help from the supporting cast (María Botto reprises her role from the British version as a local police captain, and Allison Tolman has a great turn midway through the season), the four losers at the centre of Mad Dogs make for unlikely good company. It’s not as though we aren’t already awash in shows obsessed with powerful criminals and aggrieved everymen, but Cole and Ryan are more interested in pitting these two images of masculinity against one another than reinventing either. You don’t have to be a sick puppy to enjoy watching the absurd results.