Partly because I’m a dad now and partly because most nights I’m too tired to see straight, over the last year I’ve started to prefer lighter TV viewing. In that context it seems odd that I’d be drawn to a show with an overall body count higher than The Sopranos but I’ve inhaled all eight seasons of Monk, the hit crime dramedy that ran from 2002 to 2009.
Most people know the premise even if they’ve never seen the show. Tony Shalhoub is Adrian Monk, a brilliant private investigator with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that both allows him to solve seemingly impossible crimes and renders him unable to perform basic tasks. From The Mentalist to Columbo and all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, the unconventional-yet-brilliant sleuth has been a favourite of crime drama for longer than TV has existed; Shalhoub himself doubted whether he could do good work in yet another cop show.
