ABOUT THE SHOW
Zombies and meth heads. Disney and right-wingers. Publix sandwiches and hanging chads. Florida, at its core, is an active crime scene. From Perdido Key to Key West, hosts Thomas Kennedy, Gerry Doherty and David Quiñones tell the stories behind the overlapping series of scams, schemes, and stochastic violence that gives the Sunshine State its distinctly phallic shape and reputation.
But this show is about way more than the felony that is Florida. We are a cultural, political and environmental bellwether for the country and, sadly, the world. This chalked-off tabloid freak-show might seem funny now, but the Florida Man of today is destined to be your neighbor tomorrow. Have fun with that.
2020-present
Florida officially becomes “the Free State of Florida” courtesy of a population surge of Libertarian fintech/crypto psychos, hotdog-necked Boomer retirees, MAGA chuds, and the absolute worst people New York and California have to offer.
What do they all have in common? They’d all rather die than live someplace where people wear masks during a global pandemic. (This is called “liberty.”)
We’re cooking to start off this decade, boy let me tell you. (Literally, every year is hotter than the previous year.)
2010s
This is when the wheels really started to fall off. Between the ascendance of the Tea Party and its stupider little brother Qanon and the full rebuke of institutions that never helped us anyway, Florida was well on her way to manifesting her true form.
The guy who lost the 2018 gubernatorial election proceeded to get caught using meth in a Miami Beach hotel with prostitute, and he still would have been better than the guy who won.
2000s
Florida was always like this, but to find the origin of its modern day iteration, you have to go back to Nov. 7, 2000 — Election Day. This was the beginning of the end.
THE NINETIES
This kid named Elian Gonzalez was like, stolen? Or lost and then stolen? I forget, they did a South Park about it I think.
Every Puerto Rican decided to move to Orlando, for some reason (a decision many rue to this day!). Miami Beach was super gay and it ruled. Hurricane Andrew wrecked shop. This was also the beginning of the era when white authors like Dave Barry and Carl Hiassen made a mint by cornering the market in the “Aren’t all these brown people so weird?”-genre.
THE EIGHTIES
Cocaine Cowboys and Scarface. Luther Campbell started the Miami drum-and-bass movement and that’s pretty much the most thing important that happened during this era. Everyone was on drugs, but they mostly sucked.
PRE-HISTORIC
There were, like… some bugs I think? The Cubans started coming in the ’60s? They built Disney World, I know that for sure, that’s been around forever. They tried to assassinate William McKinley but he shrugged it off like whatever.
