Mad Dogs is the Breaking Bad Successor You've Been Waiting For

Last month my Facebook "friend" (and illustrator of the Scarlet Knight comic book) Al Sirois mentioned a show on Amazon called Mad Dogs.  It sounded interesting so I gave it a try.  And as the title says, the show is the successor to AMC's Breaking Bad that people have been hankering for since that show left the airwaves in 2013.

The similarity is that both are crime series with a touch of the darkly comic that involve ordinary people getting embroiled in a life of crime for which they are woefully unprepared.  In Breaking Bad it was a chemistry teacher who becomes a meth kingpin.  In Mad Dogs it starts off with four middle-aged friends going to visit an old friend at his awesome villa in Belize.  It seems like they're just going to hang around and have a great time in a tropical paradise.  Though you can tell early on that their friend Milo has some shady dealings going on.

Then Milo takes them out on a boat that they find out is stolen.  He disposes of a mysterious package and then they take a dinghy back to shore.  In one of those darkly comic touches a dwarf wearing a Grumpy Cat-type mask shows up to ask Milo where the boat is.  When Milo tells him to fuck off, the dwarf shoots him dead.

From there just about anything that can go wrong does go wrong.  There are Swedish drug dealers, Mennonites, corrupt local cops, CIA agents, FBI agents, drug dealers, and "The Cat" all trying to kill or arrest them.  Even when it seems they're going to escape, something else goes wrong.  Like at one point they get on a fishing boat to Guatemala only to be turned back by a smallpox outbreak.  Everything keeps spiraling more and more out of control until it all comes to a head.

It was a lot of fun to watch to see how things would go wrong next and what would happen to these poor American dumbasses.  I think in a way I could empathize with them.  I mean if I went to Belize I wouldn't be much better prepared than these guys.  Although I did take 3 years of Spanish, so maybe I could pick up some of the language.

Like Breaking Bad, I thought it was a great blend of action, drama, and dark humor.  In a way I suppose it's actually like Breaking Bad meets The Hangover.  If there's a Season 2 I think they'd have to do an American Horror Story-type thing where they have different people because there's no way these guys could go through another season like that and survive.  It's be like The Hangover 2 or Home Alone 2 where it's like, "Come on, how could they be so dumb to do that again?!"

Like Man in the High Castle, it's free to watch on Amazon Instant Video if you have Amazon Prime.  There is a 2012 version that aired in some other country, but I have no idea where you can find that.