Sunday, June 22, 2003

The second season of Monk, the acclaimed mystery-comedy seen on ABC, has begun and the cast is assembled in a faux clock tower constructed in the parking lot of a La Canada, Calif., private school.

The tower allows a gorgeous view overlooking much of suburban Los Angeles, which the brilliant yet everything-a-phobic Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) can scarcely appreciate.

Stranded up here in a location reached only via a stepladder and rickety spiral staircase, the cast -- Shalhoub, Bitty Schram as his nurse and confidante Sharona, Ted Levine as stern Capt. Stottlemeyer and Jason Gray-Stanford as the nebbishy Lt. Disher -- shoot take after take as Monk deconstructs a crime scene.

This despite the heavy winds that, through the sound man's headset, seem to approximate gale force. Schram, whose ordinarily frizzy mane soon looks like her head had been jammed into an out-of-control cotton-candy machine, will later admit, "I could not hear what anyone was saying."

It's actually an appropriate site to catch up with Monk. The show indeed seems to be on top of the world, emerging as an instant hit and winning Shalhoub a Golden Globe, with its breezy wit and essentially sweet nature.

Shalhoub stars as a former San Francisco police detective who, after his wife's murder, left the force because of a crippling case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Having recently returned to society with Sharona's aid, he hopes to get his old job back, but first must convince Stottlemeyer that he has sufficiently beaten back his demons -- which, of course, he hasn't -- which, naturally, leads to comic misadventures whenever he serves as a consultant on murder cases.