BY VIRGINIA ROHAN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

The murder victim lies in a bloody pool in her San Francisco apartment. A cadre of cops and detectives surrounds the body, solemnly watching -- and waiting for a revelation from -- Adrian Monk, the brilliant and intuitive master sleuth.

"The stove . . . " Monk begins.

"Over here," another detective says, pointing to the victim's oven.

"No, I mean my stove," Monk says.

His assistant, a licensed practical nurse named Sharona, reassures Monk she "turned all the knobs," and he resumes his theorizing. But he soon stops again.

"I'm sorry. I'm having trouble concentrating, because I think I smelled gas," Monk says, turning again to Sharona. "Did you hear the click? Because you gotta hear the click. You can't just feel it."

Meet "Monk," the man USA Network is billing as TV's "first obsessive-compulsive detective." In the new series of the same name, this crippled genius -- a "defective detective," as one of his colleagues puts it -- is played, with frequent humor and occasional poignancy, by Tony Shalhoub ("Wings," "Big Night").

Says writer and executive producer Andy Breckman, "I think every hero in every story ever written has to overcome some obstacle . . . and this is a pretty interesting obstacle to throw at a detective."

Monk recoils from coughing children, grabs for tissues after shaking hands, and compulsively counts parking meters and poles in his path -- even when he's running from a killer. He keeps each pair of his socks in a different plastic bag in his drawer, counts his toothbrush strokes, and can't resist the urge to straighten the pillows on his shrink's couch.

Sure, these things look funny, but will viewers also see -- or get -- outwardly comical rituals? Or will the show just reinforce misconceptions about the illness -- and stigmatize sufferers?

"Monk" will unquestionably focus attention on obsessive-compulsive disorder -- a frequently misunderstood but fairly common illness. According to the Connecticut-based Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation, one in 40 adults has it.

As the name indicates, OCD usually involves having both obsessions and compulsions. An obsessive fear of germs, for example, may lead to compulsive washing of the hands. Other common compulsions include repeating, checking, touching, counting, ordering/arranging, hoarding or saving, and praying. These rituals are attempts to temporarily reduce the anxiety.

"Normally, what you see of everyone's OCD is just the tip of the iceberg. They do this weird thing," says Jon Grayson, a clinical psychologist and director of the Anxiety and Agoraphobia Treatment Center in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has been working with OCD patients since 1978. "Sufferers . . . find it very upsetting to see it portrayed as something so easy, and funny. In fact, it's almost a very [emotionally] painful disorder."

Robert Kornhaber, a Fort Lee, N.J., psychologist, was concerned that "Monk" might leave the wrong impression about how serious the illness can be.

"If [Monk] is functioning, then he has a mild to moderate degree," Kornhaber says. "Some OCD patients are totally disabled. Their lives are ruled by their compulsions and obsessions."

Xavier Amador, a clinical psychologist who's director of research education and practice for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, says he wrote to the show's producers recently offering to "consult for free." Like others interviewed before the show's debut, Amador had not yet seen the series.
"My main concern is that the writers are sophisticated enough to know that their viewers can laugh and laugh more heartily with the protagonist than at him," Amador says. "My hope is that they will educate rather than treat people as objects of disdain and laughter, and promote stigma and ignorance."

With the exception of "A Beautiful Mind" -- the Oscar-winning movie about schizophrenic John Forbes Nash -- the entertainment industry has generally taken the "low road" in portraying the mentally ill, Amador says.

When it comes to OCD, depictions of sufferers run from Bill Murray's hilariously over-the-top obsessive loser in "What About Bob?" to Jack Nicholson's tragi-comic portrayal of a successful writer made miserable by his compulsions in "As Good as It Gets" -- a film that consulted with the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation to ensure its technical accuracy.
Nicholson's character avoided sidewalk cracks and repeatedly checked his locks, but he was also shown to be tortured by his condition -- a point not made, for example, in "Stark Raving Mad," the 1999 NBC comedy in which Neil Patrick Harris played a germophobic book editor with a dependence on hand sanitizer. (Shalhoub, coincidentally, was his co-star.)

In its early days, "Everybody Loves Raymond" also played up the fact that Ray Barone's brother, Robert, compulsively touched his glass or spoon to his chin before drinking or eating. His apparent OCD has since been toned down, according to Brad Garrett, who plays Robert, because star Ray Romano worried that his TV brother would come off as too "goofy."

"Monk," which airs at 10 p.m. EDT Fridays, seems to have no such concerns. Some OCD-related scenes are almost slapstick, including one heavily promoted sequence in which Monk places tissues on a ladder before descending into a sewer. Even the press kit went for the yuks, including antibacterial wipes imprinted with the slogan "Crime solving is a dirty business. That's the problem."

Breckman, whose writing credits include NBC's "Late Night With David Letterman," says that he and his "Monk" partner, executive producer David Hoberman, do not use a technical consultant to review scripts, but did do research before they started.

"We talked to some shrinks and some therapists and they described what some of their patients go through, although Monk's symptoms are, I believe, unique in the annals of medicine," Breckman says. "I don't think any doctor's ever seen his particular cluster of symptoms. We took some liberties."

Monk is a veritable smorgasbord of obsessions and phobias, which his captain (Ted Levine) believes make him unfit for duty. And so, despite his legendary, Zen-like deductive approach, Monk is fighting to get back his job as homicide detective on the San Francisco police force. In the meantime, he works as a special consultant on cases.

The show implies that Monk's OCD was brought on by his wife's murder, by car bomb, four years before.

"It's a form of anxiety disorder," Sharona (Bitty Schram), Monk's nurse-assistant, tells one of his many critics. "A severe case like this is usually triggered by a single traumatic incident."

But Breckman clarifies this. "I think that in Monk's story, he was always fighting these obsessions and compulsions, but the death of his wife magnified them," he says. "In some episodes, we flash back to his college days and we see the beginnings of them."

As for the screwball antics -- in some scenes, Monk is buffoonish -- Breckman says, "I don't think we ever disguised the fact that Monk has real problems. We also are showing that he is triumphing over them."

Nor do the writers ignore Monk's brilliance -- or inner torment. At one point, when Sharona tells him he's "going straight to hell," he replies, "I am in hell."

And what fuels this inferno?

"The core of OCD for almost everyone, regardless of how the symptoms look, is that the individual is trying to be 100 percent certain about things, and generally, they fail at that, because there's nothing you can be 100 percent certain about," Grayson says. "Uncertainty feels more uncomfortable to them. They feel incredibly anxious."

Those who don't have OCD need only think back to last fall's anthrax scare to get a feel for the torture of it all, the experts say.
Not everyone thinks "Monk" should be expected to educate the public about OCD, though.

Dr. Michael Jenike, the psychiatrist who runs the Massachusetts General Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Institute at McLean Hospital -- a residential program for what he describes as "the sickest in the whole country or the world -- thinks that's unrealistic.

"Every time there's a new show, patients would start e-mailing me that I should protest whatever," he says. "But if they expect TV and entertainment to reflect real life, it's going to get them into trouble."

Others in the field, however, would like "Monk" to make some important points clear.

"This is a disorder of the brain, not something someone wishes upon himself or that is created by bad parenting," says Amador of NAMI.

Amador and Grayson would also like viewers to know that OCD is highly treatable, with behavioral therapy and medication.

"The majority of people who get good treatment -- 70 percent of people who do -- get better," Grayson says. "The sad thing is, they can't show the right treatment (in 'Monk'), because then, of course, he would get better."

And lose a valuable TV premise.