Alan Haber: When Monk Goes Bad. A look at the sad decline of one of cable television's best shows. buhdge

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"Someone should translate the idea of 15 minutes of fame into a reality show. Now, that kind of thing I would watch, as long as the briefly-famous person went right back into obscurity immediately after his or her segment."-Alan Haber

*When Monk* Goes Bad You can't rush the Monk? Alan Haber will see about that The instances, even recent ones, of networks or producers or whoever monkeying** around with popular shows are many; take what has happened to NBC's The West Wing, for example. Take, for another, what has come to be known as the Who's the Boss curse: don't monkey around with the central conceit of a show. In Who's the Boss's case, Angela and Tony finally got together. Same with the most horizontal show ever on television, Moonlighting. Lesson not learned: don't have your characters do the horizontal unless you're prepared to go vertical as well. Shows go off course all the time. There are myriad reasons--stars want more money and networks don't want to pay, for instance, and roles have to be recast--but to the audience these reasons are hardly material. Fans of a show want to see the show they love, not a new version necessitated by behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Remember when they switched Darrins on Bewitched? Remember when they switched Miss Ellies on Dallas? (Okay, Barbara Bel Geddes became Donna Reed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Donna Reed never said the name Jock like Barbara Bel Geddes). Remember when the eldest daughter on Roseanne became Sarah Chalke, who now costars on NBC's Scrubs? Characters can certainly change along the way during the run of a show; they can adopt different opinions on politics, child rearing, cheating in Scrabble, and they can change their hairstyles. Characters can sing a new tune, kid, and they can have their ears lowered. They can even change their birthdays--continuity mistakes on shows, particularly dramas, are legendary (it used to happen on The X-Files all the time). The real problems arise when characters don't all of a sudden change, but change all the time, which has been the case for at least this past half-season on USA's Monk (the series returns for the second half of its third season in January 2005). The Monk, as Tony Shaloub's character referred to himself on a recent first-run episode, shoulders more writer or producer-instigated (take your pick) changes than most people change opinions on who should win the November Presidential election. Let's see: Monk is obsessive-compulsive. Check. Monk is a brilliant detective. Double check. Monk was so in love with his wife Trudy that, since her murder, he has dedicated himself to finding out who is responsible. Triple check. Monk depends on his nurse/assistant, Sharona Fleming, to help him get through the day and solve cases (but not anymore--see below). Check to the fourth power. Some or none of the aforementioned may be true, depending on the episode in question. Check, please. Monk is burdened by his obsessive-compulsiveness. He can't shake people's hands unless Sharona hands him a wipe to wash off the inevitable germs. His apartment is so clean, you can literally eat off any surface, including the ceiling. He always buttons the top button on his shirts (no ties, thank you). He always get his man (or woman). These things never change. At least they didn't for the first two seasons. Or, more accurately, the end of the second season. In the inevitable cliffhanger, entitled "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail," our hero goes undercover as a prisoner to either prove innocent or guilty a rather hefty-looking character named Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck. If Monk proves his innocence, Dale will give him a prime piece of information about Trudy's murder. This Monk does, so Dale tells him that the car bomb that killed Trudy was meant for her, and that he must go to New York City to talk to another guy who may be able to shed light on some more pertinent information. This, too, Monk does, and in the third season opener, our beloved OCD detective travels to New York City where everything about the show starts to go horribly wrong. In the third season opener, "Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan," Mr. Monk acts both like himself and like some clueless writer's idea of how he should act (I can hear the writer now: "Hey, let's let him loose in the Big Apple and have some wacky, crazy fun!") Now, I have no problems with jokes at Monk's expense, at least if Monk is in on or displays a sense of humor about the jokes. In this episode, Monk is the object of the joke. What's more, so are the supporting characters. Captain Stottlemeyer's right-hand man, the earnest but semi-bumbling Randy Disher, emerges from a taxi as it pulls up to the gang's hotel with a camera in his hand, taking pictures like someone who's never been away from his hometown (or out of the house very often). Mistake number one. Later in the episode, he buys a knockoff watch from a street vendor, and can't believe it's fake when Sharona tells him. Mistake number two. Randy's not that stupid. Neither is Stottlemeyer or Sharona, who seem to retain most of their dignity during this episode. It's Monk, unfortunately, who loses the most face. After having him contend with the noise and congestion of the city streets, at which point he acts accordingly and correctly (and predictably), the writers have him fall for a game of three-card monte. Monk Mistake number one. Monk would never fall for such an obvious con; he's too smart for that. This is a guy who sees the one strand of nearly opaque hair lying in the crack between peel-and-stick floor tiles. And let's not forget that he convinced his buds to join him on the Manhattan trip even though the likelihood of Dale "The Whale's" tip about Trudy's murder panning out was bound to deliver just like any empty promise. In the second-season closer, as I remember, Dale even laughed about it after Monk had left the room. Is Monk a comedy? Is Monk a drama? Is Monk a comedy and a drama? Is Monk a dramedy? A comedramedy? Can the writers even make up their minds? From the evidence presented during the recently-concluded first half of the third season, I'm not sure. Witness the second episode of the season, "Mr. Monk and the Panic Room," in which a chimp named Darwin is discovered by police standing next to a dead man's body in the aforementioned panic room. The chimp is holding the gun, and is deemed the suspect. Having Sharona break Darwin out of chimp death row, where he's awaiting extermination thanks to his alleged dirty deed, and depositing him in Monk's apartment, is borderline crazy (if Sharona really understands Monk as she professes to, why would she even think of such a thing?). But having Stottlemeyer try to prove that. given enough provoking, the chimp could fire a gun is even crazier, especially when, locked in a room alone with each other, Stottlemeyer goads the chimp and tries to force his hand by mocking him. Wearing a fez and banging chimp-sized cymbals together and jumping around like a chimp, Stottlemeyer joins the ranks of beloved TV show characters who have quite simply lost their minds (I forgot to mention that Disher has given Stottlemeyer an unloaded gun to give to the chimp, but wait!, the gun is actually loaded!). The next trio of season three episodes borders on the absurd, but manages to entertain and keep the character's growing pomposity from growing out of proportion. Then come three terrific episodes in a row: "Mr. Monk and the Girl Who Cried Wolf," "Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month," and "Mr. Monk and the Game Show," all of which seem to suggest that the writers woke suddenly one morning with their heads on straight and fixed just about every thing that was suddenly wrong with the show only a few episodes before. And then, for the third season finale, all hell broke loose once again. In "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine," our hero finally agrees to take a new medication that might or might not help him cope. Coping, Monk tells his shrink, is something he just can't do anymore. Okay, believable so far. Until, that is, the medicine kicks in, which, apparently, happens overnight (uh, no). There is a wonderfully touching scene in which Monk takes a pillow that Trudy slept on out of the closet (of course it's encased in a plastic cover to keep out the germs); Trudy appears to Monk as a hallucination, comforting him. The writers have Monk wake up the next morning ditching his usual Monk attire for a baggy Hawaiian shirt and a sarcastic attitude that is so not Monk. In Monk's place is...The Monk, hip, with considerable swagger, acting like an idiot. Is anybody reading these scripts? If the writers' goal was to show that such medicines can be harmful to some patients, then they did their job. But I suspect that wasn't a goal at all. Monk does say something about being back to his old self when the medicine wears off--again, seemingly overnight--and suddenly, he's back in his old shirts with the top button buttoned. Just like that. You know, you can get whiplash from this show, watching the changes pass before your mystified eyes. So, on to the second half of season three--seven episodes this time out--that will run without Bitty Schram, the gifted comedic actress who played Sharona. Apparently, the writers have decided to go in a different creative direction with some of the characters (or, as some reports have it, the other actors asked for too much money to return, meaning Schram drew the proverbial short salary straw). A new character, which will replace Sharona, has been cast, and the lucky winning actress is Traylor Howard, late of such failed sitcoms as Boston Common and Bram and Alice. Lord knows how this will affect the multi-dynamics of the show. It hurts to see good things go bad. It used to be that shows didn't sound the gotta-fix-it bell until a good long stretch of time had gone by, but they seem to have sounded the bell numerous times already, and it has resulted in a show that doesn't seem to know itself. Which is a pity for us and a hell of a headache for them. Somebody get us all an aspirin. September 19 , 2004
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When Monk Goes Bad
You can't rush the Monk? Alan Haber will see about that

The instances, even recent ones, of networks or producers or whoever monkeying around with popular shows are many; take what has happened to NBC's The West Wing, for example. Take, for another, what has come to be known as the Who's the Boss curse: don't monkey around with the central conceit of a show. In Who's the Boss's case, Angela and Tony finally got together. Same with the most horizontal show ever on television, Moonlighting. Lesson not learned: don't have your characters do the horizontal unless you're prepared to go vertical as well.

Shows go off course all the time. There are myriad reasons--stars want more money and networks don't want to pay, for instance, and roles have to be recast--but to the audience these reasons are hardly material. Fans of a show want to see the show they love, not a new version necessitated by behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Remember when they switched Darrins on Bewitched? Remember when they switched Miss Ellies on Dallas? (Okay, Barbara Bel Geddes became Donna Reed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Donna Reed never said the name Jock like Barbara Bel Geddes). Remember when the eldest daughter on Roseanne became Sarah Chalke, who now costars on NBC's Scrubs?

Characters can certainly change along the way during the run of a show; they can adopt different opinions on politics, child rearing, cheating in Scrabble, and they can change their hairstyles. Characters can sing a new tune, kid, and they can have their ears lowered. They can even change their birthdays--continuity mistakes on shows, particularly dramas, are legendary (it used to happen on The X-Files all the time).

The real problems arise when characters don't all of a sudden change, but change all the time, which has been the case for at least this past half-season on USA's Monk (the series returns for the second half of its third season in January 2005). The Monk, as Tony Shaloub's character referred to himself on a recent first-run episode, shoulders more writer or producer-instigated (take your pick) changes than most people change opinions on who should win the November Presidential election.

Let's see: Monk is obsessive-compulsive. Check. Monk is a brilliant detective. Double check. Monk was so in love with his wife Trudy that, since her murder, he has dedicated himself to finding out who is responsible. Triple check. Monk depends on his nurse/assistant, Sharona Fleming, to help him get through the day and solve cases (but not anymore--see below). Check to the fourth power. Some or none of the aforementioned may be true, depending on the episode in question. Check, please.

Monk is burdened by his obsessive-compulsiveness. He can't shake people's hands unless Sharona hands him a wipe to wash off the inevitable germs. His apartment is so clean, you can literally eat off any surface, including the ceiling. He always buttons the top button on his shirts (no ties, thank you). He always get his man (or woman). These things never change. At least they didn't for the first two seasons.

Or, more accurately, the end of the second season. In the inevitable cliffhanger, entitled "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail," our hero goes undercover as a prisoner to either prove innocent or guilty a rather hefty-looking character named Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck. If Monk proves his innocence, Dale will give him a prime piece of information about Trudy's murder. This Monk does, so Dale tells him that the car bomb that killed Trudy was meant for her, and that he must go to New York City to talk to another guy who may be able to shed light on some more pertinent information. This, too, Monk does, and in the third season opener, our beloved OCD detective travels to New York City where everything about the show starts to go horribly wrong.

In the third season opener, "Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan," Mr. Monk acts both like himself and like some clueless writer's idea of how he should act (I can hear the writer now: "Hey, let's let him loose in the Big Apple and have some wacky, crazy fun!") Now, I have no problems with jokes at Monk's expense, at least if Monk is in on or displays a sense of humor about the jokes. In this episode, Monk is the object of the joke. What's more, so are the supporting characters.

Captain Stottlemeyer's right-hand man, the earnest but semi-bumbling Randy Disher, emerges from a taxi as it pulls up to the gang's hotel with a camera in his hand, taking pictures like someone who's never been away from his hometown (or out of the house very often). Mistake number one. Later in the episode, he buys a knockoff watch from a street vendor, and can't believe it's fake when Sharona tells him. Mistake number two. Randy's not that stupid. Neither is Stottlemeyer or Sharona, who seem to retain most of their dignity during this episode.

It's Monk, unfortunately, who loses the most face. After having him contend with the noise and congestion of the city streets, at which point he acts accordingly and correctly (and predictably), the writers have him fall for a game of three-card monte. Monk Mistake number one. Monk would never fall for such an obvious con; he's too smart for that. This is a guy who sees the one strand of nearly opaque hair lying in the crack between peel-and-stick floor tiles. And let's not forget that he convinced his buds to join him on the Manhattan trip even though the likelihood of Dale "The Whale's" tip about Trudy's murder panning out was bound to deliver just like any empty promise. In the second-season closer, as I remember, Dale even laughed about it after Monk had left the room.

Is Monk a comedy? Is Monk a drama? Is Monk a comedy and a drama? Is Monk a dramedy? A comedramedy? Can the writers even make up their minds? From the evidence presented during the recently-concluded first half of the third season, I'm not sure.

Witness the second episode of the season, "Mr. Monk and the Panic Room," in which a chimp named Darwin is discovered by police standing next to a dead man's body in the aforementioned panic room. The chimp is holding the gun, and is deemed the suspect. Having Sharona break Darwin out of chimp death row, where he's awaiting extermination thanks to his alleged dirty deed, and depositing him in Monk's apartment, is borderline crazy (if Sharona really understands Monk as she professes to, why would she even think of such a thing?). But having Stottlemeyer try to prove that. given enough provoking, the chimp could fire a gun is even crazier, especially when, locked in a room alone with each other, Stottlemeyer goads the chimp and tries to force his hand by mocking him. Wearing a fez and banging chimp-sized cymbals together and jumping around like a chimp, Stottlemeyer joins the ranks of beloved TV show characters who have quite simply lost their minds (I forgot to mention that Disher has given Stottlemeyer an unloaded gun to give to the chimp, but wait!, the gun is actually loaded!).

The next trio of season three episodes borders on the absurd, but manages to entertain and keep the character's growing pomposity from growing out of proportion. Then come three terrific episodes in a row: "Mr. Monk and the Girl Who Cried Wolf," "Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month," and "Mr. Monk and the Game Show," all of which seem to suggest that the writers woke suddenly one morning with their heads on straight and fixed just about every thing that was suddenly wrong with the show only a few episodes before.

And then, for the third season finale, all hell broke loose once again. In "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine," our hero finally agrees to take a new medication that might or might not help him cope. Coping, Monk tells his shrink, is something he just can't do anymore. Okay, believable so far. Until, that is, the medicine kicks in, which, apparently, happens overnight (uh, no). There is a wonderfully touching scene in which Monk takes a pillow that Trudy slept on out of the closet (of course it's encased in a plastic cover to keep out the germs); Trudy appears to Monk as a hallucination, comforting him. The writers have Monk wake up the next morning ditching his usual Monk attire for a baggy Hawaiian shirt and a sarcastic attitude that is so not Monk. In Monk's place is...The Monk, hip, with considerable swagger, acting like an idiot. Is anybody reading these scripts?

If the writers' goal was to show that such medicines can be harmful to some patients, then they did their job. But I suspect that wasn't a goal at all. Monk does say something about being back to his old self when the medicine wears off--again, seemingly overnight--and suddenly, he's back in his old shirts with the top button buttoned. Just like that. You know, you can get whiplash from this show, watching the changes pass before your mystified eyes.

So, on to the second half of season three--seven episodes this time out--that will run without Bitty Schram, the gifted comedic actress who played Sharona. Apparently, the writers have decided to go in a different creative direction with some of the characters (or, as some reports have it, the other actors asked for too much money to return, meaning Schram drew the proverbial short salary straw). A new character, which will replace Sharona, has been cast, and the lucky winning actress is Traylor Howard, late of such failed sitcoms as Boston Common and Bram and Alice. Lord knows how this will affect the multi-dynamics of the show.

It hurts to see good things go bad. It used to be that shows didn't sound the gotta-fix-it bell until a good long stretch of time had gone by, but they seem to have sounded the bell numerous times already, and it has resulted in a show that doesn't seem to know itself. Which is a pity for us and a hell of a headache for them.

Somebody get us all an aspirin.

September 19 , 2004