TV Review: Monk
July 31, 2005
Last week in my piece about the summer at the movies, it was plain to see a nagging guilt complex forming in the first paragraph over my neglecting of summer TV, which is understandable from both sides of the argument. On the one hand, summer is not the prime season for new television, what with the sickening amount of reality shows (Dance? Come on, we’ve got to do better than that, don’t we?), and a louder-by-the-day needy voice in the pit of your TV loving stomach saying, “When is “Lost” coming back, please tell me it’s soon.” Rightfully, summer belongs not to TV, but to baseball (small glimmer of hope to my fellow Mets fans as the team chases a wild card spot), baseball in the movies (kudos to Billy Bob for his swell performance in the mildly entertaining “Bad News Bears” remake), golf (a personal best 40 at Cassadaga this year has been my number one summer highlight, as sad as that may be), and golf in the movies (nothing really, but check out Bill Murray in “Caddyshack” if you haven’t in a while, it’s hilarious), but still, there is some good to come from the summer offerings on the tube this summer, so here are a few thoughts on just one of them, and over the course of August, before the new fall season kicks into gear, I’ll try to highlight more of what’s worth watching. But for now, let’s kick things of on USA, with everybody’s favorite defective detective, Mr. Monk.
Now in its fourth season, “Monk”, a show that had trouble in its third season transitioning Traylor Howard into Bitty Schram’s position as finicky detective Adrian Monk’s (Tony Shalhoub) personal nurse and partner, is averaging the strongest audience since its debut season. The trouble the show had started sometime before Schram’s departure midseason, with Monk’s obsessive compulsive problems threatened to drown the series in increasingly annoying familiarities (when Monk couldn’t walk on a New York City sidewalk because it had too many cracks, I thought the show had officially jumped the shark), but four episodes into the new season, it seems the kinks have been worked out, the cracks have been filled in, and the show is back in form, with it’s workable mixture of slapstick and pathos, centered around a puzzling mystery case that Adrian always solves, somehow, in the final five minutes. The episode that got the most press was the opener, with Shalhoub’s former NBC Thursday night pal Jason Alexander (he of “Seinfeld”, Shalhoub of “Wings”), guest starring as a slovenly detective who usurps Monk’s position as San Francisco’s most sought after private eye, but for what it’s worth, episode two and four were much better, primarily because of the tremendous hint of sentimentality Shalhoub pulls off so well. In ep two, John Turturro returned as Adrian’s agoraphobic brother Ambrose, in an episode dealing with their long missing deadbeat father, as well as Ambrose’s sad and lonely life. When Ambrose takes a liking to Natalie, and shyly asks her for a date, there is a painful moment when she balks, and he retreats like an embarrassed turtle, back into his psychotic, solitary shell.
If Turturro stole the show from Shalhoub with his pathos-filled performance that episode, it was a rare occasion, given how brilliant Shalhoub is in his Emmy-winning role. Shalhoub’s best hour came last week in an episode called “Mr. Monk Goes to the Office”, where Adrian took a boring, repetitive, office job as undercover to solve a case, and was ecstatic to be included in regular office friendships, up until his phobias outted him as the office weirdo. “Ah, there it is,” he says, about the familiar laughter following him out of the room, as Natalie, who was also rejected, by a love interest, consoled our poor hurt hero. This is what makes “Monk” still worth watching, Shalhoub’s incredible performance, filled with great pantomime (in one scene he tries to ventriloquist his theory to Natalie as a lip reader scrutinizes him from an adjacent table), and feeling, while the situations he involves himself in constantly put to test his phobias and resilience. Most of the time, Mr. Monk can conquer his fears just enough to solve the case, but when it comes to putting on a pair of used bowling shoes, to keep his friends, and win an office title, the fear is just too overpowering, and the loss is heartbreaking. At least Monk has Natalie to console him and get him through the day, and thankfully we have a rejuvenated “Monk” to get us through a somewhat boring summer.
“Monk” airs Fridays at 10 on USA, and again Monday at 10 for those who missed it the first time.
by Adam Suraf