‘Mad Dogs’ Recap, Episode 2: Boat Seriously

When a dwarf in a cat mask shoots your friend to death and warns you to return his stolen property in 24 hours or you’ll be next, you’ve pretty much got your day planned out for you. It’s also reasonable to assume this has the TV series in which you’re starring pretty much mapped out as well. Surely Cobi, Gus, Joel, and Lex, the feckless foursome at the heart of Mad Dogs, will spend its ten-episode run battling their way back to the boat, like Martin Sheen going up the river looking for Colonel Kurtz (who they went so far as to name-drop in the pilot), right?

Wrong, actually. Well, kinda. Within the first few minutes of “Xtabai,” Mad Dogs’ second episode (which you can watch on Amazon Prime Video), our heroes have already triumphantly returned to the stolen yacht that got their frienemy Milo murdered. Granted, it gets a whole lot more complicated from there. But the unexpected immediacy with which they find the boat was a pleasant shock to the system. For one thing, zooming right through what seemed like it was going to be a long journey through beaucoup screentime toward an obviously inevitable destination was a smart storytelling decision. Unless you’re Game of Thrones, a lot of shows would benefit from taking a hatchet to all the buildup and just getting down to business. For another, genre shows like this rely on familiarity way more than originality — that’s what makes a genre a genre, after all, common tonal and narrative elements — so almost any curveball is worth throwing.

From there, the episode becomes a more standard Murphy’s Law story. A husband-and-wife pair of European drug smugglers shows up unexpectedly and takes a hidden cache of contraband off the friends’ hands at gunpoint, in exchange for a duffelbag full of cash they insist gets dropped off with the mysterious ganglord Jésus or else. The Eurotrash then disable the boat, forcing the friends to trek back and forth from the boat to the wilderness, from the wilderness to the villa, from the villa to a convenience store to rental agency to a parking lot, all in order to have a place to stash the money, repair the boat, and return it in time. Meanwhile, Cobi’s one-night-stand Angel returns for help with a financial transaction he promised he’d give her; a mysterious package is delivered containing a gun; a car accident leaves them one stack short when the woman they rear-ended insists on getting paid immediately; the smiling cop from the pilot returns with a glowering goon and tries to turn Gus on his friends; a dog digs up Milo’s body so they stuff it in the freezer instead; the Cat’s still lurking around; and oh yeah, they discover some sort of underworld shrine. Long day!

As in the pilot, the performances go a long way to keeping the early-Tarantino black-comedy-of-errors stuff emotionally palatable. Ben Chaplin’s Joel still seems very, very deeply embittered about, well, everything; he’s the last person of the four I’d want to see with the gun, but that’s how it goes down. Steve Zahn’s Cobi and Romany Malco’s Gus feel like opposite ends of the spectrum from one another, with the former responding to their plight mainly with sarcasm and the latter seemingly the closest to cracking under the strain. (“We’re not gonna make it out of this, are we?” he asks rhetorically at one point, and that’s before the cop tries to pressure him to snitch on his friends.) Michael Imperoli’s Lex feels like the most decent of the bunch, and a handful shots — he stealthily empties out the remainder of Milo’s booze so he’s not tempted; he jumps into the drug stash to help unload it all the quicker — show how hard he has to work at that. Even Jodie Turner-Smith turns Angel, a role that could simply have been a pretty face oblivious to her danger, into a character who convincingly commands the room, despite the presence of a murderous cat-man in the next one.

But it’s the economy of the thing that really keeps it humming. Clocking in at under 40 minutes—on par with network dramas but far shorter than the frequently elephantine runtimes of pay-cable and streaming shows—it’s an experiment in doing drama at less than the maximum length allowed by law and/or attention span. Ash vs. Evil Dead, Starz’s similarly wild horror-comedy hybrid, benefited a great deal from its half-hour-ish runtime: While it was funny, it definitely wasn’t a sitcom, but the traditional sitcom length gave its intense, often unpleasant violence felt like the short sharp shock it needed to. Get in, do your job, get out. It’s a mantra both our boys and their sinister pursuer might appreciate.

[Watch Mad Dogs on Amazon Prime Video]

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.