BY PHIL ROSENTHAL TELEVISION CRITIC
There's always been something incredibly satisfying about the unraveling of a mystery (and, inevitably, a smug offender) through acute observation, deduction, intuition and common sense.
That's why we've always loved the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Banacek, Columbo, Ellery Queen, Encyclopedia Brown, Barnaby Jones and even Jessica Fletcher.
Tony Shalhoub's obsessive compulsive germophobe Adrian Monk did not initially seem to be a sleuth of their caliber.
Monk solved crimes all right--brilliantly--but at the same he seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that so many of his fellow "San Francisco" residents were one-dimensional, spouted cliches and had Canadian accents. In time over its first season on cable's USA Network, the quality improved, and "Monk" developed a following last summer, becoming the highest-rated original scripted series in basic-cable history and so well received that struggling ABC picked up an option to air reruns.
Now, at long last, "Monk" returns at 9 tonight on USA, launching a second season of 16 episodes with a *** episode in which former Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy guest stars as a married teacher who offs his pregnant girlfriend, becoming just the latest to think he can outsmart Monk.
The supporting characters remain a little too standard-issue. But the show's production values are improved thanks to a 20 percent increase in the series budget, enabling the series to shoot in Los Angeles (rather than Toronto) and attract better-known guest stars and other actors who can pronounce the word "about" properly.
This throwback may never be great TV, but it's certainly good enough to hold one's interest. Mainly, it's just fun to watch Shalhoub do his thing as the odd savant still nursing psychic wounds from the death of his wife.
When Monk notices there are unequal amounts of coffee in a pair of side-by-side pots, an interrogation comes to a screeching halt while he mixes decaf and regular joe to even things up, and you just have to watch and smile.
Unfortunately, Monk's idiosyncracies only serve to underscore just how ordinary the by-the-numbers characters around him are.
Sharona (Bitty Schram), Monk's nurse and Girl Friday, has some depth to her, and we learn a little more about her each week.
But Capt. Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), who was Monk's boss on the police force before he became obsessive compulsive, remains a cardboard cutout as a jealous rival. Lt. Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford), Stottlemeyer's impressed-with-Monk underling, is little better.
You've seen most of these characters--as well as the crimes and the criminals they face each week--a thousand times before.
But in a world where people wonder if justice
will be done in Laci Peterson's murder, perhaps that kind of familiarity
is reassuring. Maybe it's just nice to know that--thanks to one brilliant
detective--a northern California man who's cheating on his wife, murders
his pregnant lover and thinks he can get away with it won't. Not this week.
Not on USA, at least.