![]() ![]() ![]() The murder is ancillary to the actual mystery of whether or not Trudy is alive, and it’s never all that convincing. When the man she was talking to turns up murdered, several clues at the crime scene point to Trudy. Natalie sees a woman who looks just like Trudy in a diner and overhears that she faked her own death when she was being threatened over a story she was working on about corruption in the local dockworkers union, and now she needs to get back some documents from her co-writer. Monk makes a lot of false starts on solving Trudy’s murder over the course of the show’s eight seasons, and it’s always a bummer, but this episode is a bummer without any satisfying payoff. Quite the contrary, in fact, he’s surrounded by other heightened characters in his fellow patients, which pull focus from Monk without much payoff. It’s a shame, because Kevin Nealon is doing great work guest starring as a fellow patient who’s a pathological liar.ġ24. ![]() Without the grounding presence of Stottlemeyer and Disher, Monk’s heightened character has nothing to bounce against. Lancaster manipulates Monk into thinking he’s going crazy, but the solution isn’t especially clever or outrageous. Solving the mystery is just kind of frustrating rather than rewarding, as Dr. ![]() Lancaster (Dennis Boutsikaris), killed his partner several years ago and framed a patient for it. Monk is institutionalized after accidentally breaking into Trudy’s old house in a fugue state, where he figures out that the hospital’s director, Dr. Monk, and you get this, the weakest of the weak of the series. Add in a half-assed bad doctor villain and an unusually passive Mr. Monk Goes to the Asylum” is the weakest of the bunch. Monk is separated from the captain et al., and they’re usually some of the weakest. It’s inevitable that a show occasionally has to break up its core cast, usually due to budget restraints or scheduling conflicts. To get excited for the movie, now streaming on Peacock, I ranked every episode of the series, with that core thesis in mind. Monk’s Last Case, post-COVID the whole world is living like Mr. As several of his friends point out in Mr. The show’s signature blend of dark humor is still potent nearly 15 years after its series finale aired, if not more so. When Trudy’s daughter, Molly (Caitlin McGee), needs Monk’s help solving her fiancé’s mysterious death, Monk is reminded how much he matters to the people in his life. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, doubles down on that theme, finding Monk the most depressed we’ve ever seen him after COVID lockdown. Monk’s love for Trudy compels him to keep working, but the people who love Monk help keep him living. Ultimately, though, Monk is a show about love. The show is at its best when a big bully underestimates Monk, dismissing him as a sad, strange little man, only to be outsmarted with a smirk and a, “Here’s what happened.” The team wrung every ounce of comedy and drama out of their lead’s fears and compulsions, tempering his sadness and vulnerability with a wry yet goofy sense of humor. The show’s creator, Andy Breckman, wrote for Late Night With David Letterman and Saturday Night Live before developing Monk and brought on writers with a similar background in comedy in addition to more traditional mystery writers. Monk’s writing staff was (mostly) able to balance its dark premise with light humor, setting the template for shows like Psych, Burn Notice, and Suits. Monk is the progenitor of the blue-sky shows, a term given to the breezy procedurals that populated the USA Network during the mid-aughts to distinguish them from the grittier dramas found elsewhere on basic cable. If it’s not clear from that description, it’s also a really funny show! He does this work in the hopes of getting reinstated to the police force and, in some ways, to atone for the fact that Trudy’s murder still remains a mystery. Monk is called in as a consultant to solve the cases that stump the SFPD. With the help of Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), Lieutenant Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford), and a spunky assistant - originally Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram) and later Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard) - and the support of his beloved psychiatrists Dr. Tony Shalhoub plays the titular detective with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, who was discharged from the San Francisco police department following a mental breakdown when his wife, Trudy (Melora Hardin), was murdered. Across eight seasons, the USA procedural showed us just how dirty and dangerous the world is - or at least that’s how it appears through the eyes of its germophobic main character, Adrian Monk. Randy Newman’s jaunty theme song warns us as much at the beginning of (nearly) every episode of Monk. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy the Studios. ![]()
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