Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Monk

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

It’s a jungle out there…

With a theme tune by Randy Newman, from series 2 onwards and a premise which is as unique as a comedy drama series involving an obsessive detective can be, Monk is a sure-fire winner.

I got captivated by it after spending years avoiding it. Of course, I had heard how wonderful it was and how Tony Shalhoub, as Adrian Monk, was terrific in a very unique role, but as a highly popular series, it held little fascination for me.

But once I got through the first episode I was hooked.

It has a classic detective style to it – very Columbo. We either know who did it or we are faced with a mystery, to be solved by Mr. Adrian Monk. Monk is not a police detective – anymore – due to his OCD which provides the comedy element of the series. He is often called upon by the San Francisco Police Department by Lieutenant Leland Stottlemeyer, played by Ted Levine, and Detective Randy Disher, played by Jason Gray-Stanford. Monk, has an assistant, employed by him to make sure he has wipes at the ready and emotional support if needed. In series 1, 2 and part way through 3, that was Sharona Fleming played by Bitty Schram. From the middle of series 3 till the end she was replaced by Natalie Teeger played by Traylor Howard. Of course, Monk has a therapist too – series 1 to 6 that was, Dr Chares Kroger played by Stanley Kamel and then from series 7 onwards it was Dr. Neven Bell played by Hector Elizondo.

It had an 8 season run with 125 episodes and was a classic American television drama with around 20 episodes per season, building the drama which shifted production from Ontario in season 1 to Los Angeles, from season 2. An NBC production, Monk hit the UK through a variety of platforms including now Sky, and before Amazon Prime. Filmed and produced in the early part of this century, it does have the feeling of being slightly dated but that classic feeling I would associate with decent episodes of Kojak, Cagney and Lacey etc. after all it picked up 8 Emmys, a Golden Globe and 2 Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Created By Andy Breckman, it also held the record for the most watched episode in cable television for quite a while before The Walking Dead smashed it.

The premise around which the characters wave is that Monk left the San Francisco Police Department after a nervous breakdown, brought on by his wife, Trudy being killed by a car bomb. Initially housebound for several years, Sharona Fleming, his assistant, gets him out to investigate new crimes and mysteries. Whilst being the principal protagonist within each episode, Monk continues to look for answers to his wife’s death. Such a genius will always have “issues” – Monk has 312 things of which he is terrified, but it is his compulsions and his obsessiveness which are key elements in him solving cases.

Along with his long standing and suffering friend Stottlemeyer and Disher, they make for an impressive team as Monk, like a modern-day Holmes or Poirot spots a discrepancy, wonders and fixates on it until insight, due to an unconnected comment or event shows him just why he was right to worry and wonder about it all.

His life gets turned upside down in season 3 when his assistant, Sharona leaves to marry her ex-husband. In comes Natalie Teeger, as the new assistant and the dynamic changes slightly. Natalie lost a husband, Monk lost his wife, and so we get empathy in the relationship. Natalie is also a mother to Julie who features in a few cases – much to Monk’s annoyance and distress, and some of the best comedy moments!

Monk has a back story which goes beyond the loss of his wife Trudy as he has a brother – Ambrose – and a half-brother Jack Jr. His relationship with his father – Jack Sr. – explains quite a lot of his idiosyncrasies, as his father left whilst Adrian was very young.

Although initially conceived as a cross between an Inspector Clouseau/Sherlock Holmes style show with the trope of a dim-witted policeman being helped by a crime solving consultant detective from outside the police force, this was quickly straining those standards narratives and becoming its own beast.

It also gave us the “here’s what happened” endings which saw Monk recreate the classic, everyone in the drawing room expose, at the end of the episode. Monk would then inform the assembled crowd – sometimes of only one – as he recreates the entire crime with black and white flashbacks.

I came to love the series and played it many episodes at a time. The premise worked for me, but it was also the highly consistent work of Shalhoub that sparkled. He needed the people around him and with the dim-witted Randy, a caring and exasperated Stottlemeyer, along with the two therapists and two assistants, it had sufficient depth and development to stay the pace.

Of course, he solves Trudy’s murder. But to know the solution, you need to go and watch the episodes. I promise you won’t be disappointed…

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television, you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out…

Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown.