Andy Breckman, 2002–2009
When the pandemic started, over two years ago now, Ellie and I went looking for a fairly light-hearted, comfort-food type of show to pass the time during lockdown. I guess it says something about our society that one of the shows most commonly cited as fitting this bill almost invariably involves one or more gruesome murders. I had seen a grand total of one episode of Monk before we started in; it was on a plane, back in the days when plane seats had little TV screens built into the headrests, because people were not yet expected to all be carrying little TV screens around in their pockets. I’d heard of the show even before that—the so-called “obsessive-compulsive detective” had made enough of a splash in pop culture to have become familiar even to those who’d never seen an episode. The tagline doesn’t fully match the way the character is portrayed, though. I guess “obsessive-compulsive, high-functioning autistic detective with multiple phobias” didn’t fit on the DVD boxes.
Monk is generally quite formulaic, but that’s a big part of what makes it comfort food. In almost every episode, there is a smug baddie, often one who goes so far as to taunt Monk about how he can’t prove that the baddie committed the crime; in almost every episode, the baddie gets a deserved comeuppance. “Mr. Monk and the Bully”, from 2009, is probably my least favorite episode in that it’s the one in which the smug baddie’s long-deserved comeuppance doesn’t happen. The mysteries that lead to those comeuppances are of varying quality but are on the whole pretty absorbing. My understanding is that it’s not the actual mysteries that made this series a hit, though, but rather the tone—Monk was the mystery show with a quirky sense of humor back before that became a whole sub-genre of its own, and lead actor won his three Emmys for the title role in the comedy division. But to me, this was actually not one of the strengths of the series: a lot of the comedy was cringe humor—look, Monk’s embarrassing himself with his weird behavior!—and the show was tonally incoherent. Monk with his fastidiousness offers up one kind of comedy, but then Randy the police lieutenant is just a straight-out clown, so it’s like putting Niles Crane and Chief Wiggum in the same show. And then the creators go for poignant pathos on top of all this, with Monk’s grief over his wife’s death in a car bombing… I do believe that comedy and tragedy can and should coexist, and even have a whole pattern about it, but it takes quite a bit of skill to interweave them, and I don’t think Monk entirely pulls it off.
I have to mention one element of the show that really annoyed me: it is set in San Francisco, but is very, very obviously filmed in Southern California. There is actually a moment when a bus pulls up in the foreground, with a billboard on the side with an aerial shot of San Francisco and an ad for fictitious TV station KSFF—and then the bus pulls away, and behind it, we see a building inscribed with these words in big bold letters: “MALIBU PUBLIC LIBRARY”! Why not just, y’know, set the show in Los Angeles? There’s nothing about the show that demands it be set in San Francisco. It’s like something out of Saturday Night Live’s old “Goth Talk” skits. “Shall I ever find my way in this dim forest of despair?” asks the goth in a brightly lit park in Tampa, Florida, while dudebros toss around a frisbee in the background.
Still, it can’t have been all bad, because we did watch the whole series, even if it did take a bit over two years. My favorite episode was probably “Mr. Monk Stays in Bed”, which has a nifty twist after the mystery has been solved that keeps the baddie from getting away with it for lack of evidence. Again, it’s just nice to find one place where the baddies don’t get away with it, even if it is a version of San Francisco that mysteriously has Wilshire Boulevard running down the middle of it.
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