Irritating but intriguing, Adrian Monk is back

06/20/03

Mark Dawidziak
Plain Dealer Television Critic

There's only one mystery that "Monk" fans want solved. When is the show starring Tony Shalhoub as a brilliant obsessive-compulsive detective coming back for a second season?

It has been eight months since the last of the original 12 "Monk" mysteries premiered on USA Network. Asking devotees of the detective series to wait this long has been almost criminal, but hold on to your Handi Wipes, Adrian Monk is back on the case.

"Monk" returns at 10 tonight with an episode about our germ-fearing, crowd-avoiding, picture-straightening, carpet-cleaning, pillow-arranging, milk-shunning, height-frightened hero investigating a suspicious death at a prep school. Andrew McCarthy guest stars.

Much has happened since the quirky "Monk" started sleuthing in July. The cable show proved so successful so fast, ABC began repeating episodes on its prime-time schedule (and will again this year).

Comparisons were made to such revered mystery shows as "Columbo" and "The Rockford Files," and Shalhoub won a Golden Globe award in January. But the actor didn't have a clue that "Monk" mania was taking the country by storm.

"I had no idea that we were on anyone's radar," Shalhoub said Tuesday, during a telephone interview.

"We shot the first season in Toronto. Now we're in L.A. for the second season, but when you're filming, you have your head down. You're not aware of what's going on out there.

"Somehow, when I wasn't looking, this thing landed. So the Golden Globe caught me completely by surprise."

After a while, it didn't take Shalhoub long to figure out that something definitely was going on "out there."

"Now, driving around L.A., I'll just wake up to the fact there's this enormous billboard of my face up there," Shalhoub said. "All of sudden I'm thinking, 'Gee, this is not just my little world. This is spreading like a bad disease.' You don't realize that when you're working day to day."

Settling in

Written by "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Andy Breckman, the show's two-hour pilot (which is being repeated at 11 a.m. today and 1 a.m. tomorrow) introduced us to Monk, a legendary San Francisco homicide detective whose obsessive-compulsive disorder kicked into high gear after his wife was murdered. Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes is Sharona Fleming, a nurse played by Bitty Schram (the crying baseball player in "A League of Their Own").

Both infuriated and amazed by Monk's abilities are his former superior officer, Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), and Lt. Randall Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford). And as good as the first season was, there's room to improve, said Shalhoub, an executive producer on the series.

"We were really finding our way last year," he said. "We learned that we could take the risk of lacing together the comedy and the serious stuff. And I think we sort of discovered in the first season, you know, it can be done. Now I think we're settling into what people hopefully will regard as the next level."

Shalhoub, 49, is no newcomer to the series grind. He played very un-Monk-like characters in two NBC sitcoms: cabby Antonio Scarpacci on "Wings" and horror writer Ian Stark on the short-lived "Stark Raving Mad." One of his favorite episodes from last season is "Mr. Monk and the Airplane," with guest stars including his wife, Brooke Adams, and his "Wings" pal Tim Daly.

The TV detective most often mentioned in the same sentence with Monk is Peter Falk's "Columbo." Each is a supersleuth whom the murderer tends to underestimate, but the parallels pretty much end there.

"I'm a huge fan of 'Columbo' and a huge fan of Peter Falk," said Shalhoub, whose many films include "Spy Kids," "Men in Black" and "Galaxy Quest." "But I don't want to be redoing that. There's no way to improve on that. It's too good. It's like remaking 'Psycho.' What's the point? So it gets worrisome, and I kind of refer to 'Columbo' as the 'C' word when it comes up, although I do kind of look at Monk as the grandson of Columbo."

Removing the cork

Shalhoub also doesn't see many parallels between his own personality and that of the detective he plays so wonderfully.

"I don't really think he's that close to me," he said. "There are certain similarities, but in the sense that everyone has issues and compulsions and things they fixate on. It's only a question of degree.

"We all have a mechanism that allows us to get through everyday life. And when I play Monk, I just remove the cork. I allow myself to be affected by whatever is in front of me."

The challenge for Shalhoub has been to make Monk both fascinating and appealing. When he was working on the first episode, he thought to himself, "This guy is so annoying. He's so irritating. How do we make this character interesting and likable when he's so irritating?"

But then he thought, "You know what? So much of normal TV is irritating anyway. Why not play the irritating character and not try to mask it?"

The process has developed into something precious to more than just mystery fans.

"It's sort of like how a pearl is formed in an oyster," Shalhoub said. "There's a grain of sand. It's an irritant. That's it's origin. Then it's covered over and covered over by some kind of protective mechanism. Then it becomes this great, beautiful thing.

"That's my sort of internal metaphor for how I would like the show to be viewed. It starts out as this kind of irritant that gets under our skin, and then we find that way to connect to it and be drawn into it."