A Case of 'Monk' See, 'Monk' Do
August 25, 2002

I always wash my hands before turning on the TV. Why? I don't know. There may be germs on the dial. My mother always told me to wash my hands - and stand up straight. You could grow up to be like Johnny Carson, who was starched up straight.

My TV has to be in the right (southeast) corner of the den, despite my wife's feng shui man, who said it had to be in the northwest corner for blissful watching.

I always go from top to bottom when going around the dial (13 to 2, or 697 to 2 with my digital cable TV). Without a system, I'm afraid I would miss something.

But I always skip the ABC channel ever since it canceled "Once and Again" and "Sports Night." Falling in love with ABC's programs is like falling on a knife.

In short, I guess I am a compulsive-obsessive, personality-disordered TV viewer. So I was thrilled when "Monk" came to the USA Network July 12. It's a series about Adrian Monk, a detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a psychological malady that had made him take sick leave from the homicide division at the San Francisco PD.

In a groundbreaking experiment that began Aug. 13, as ABC called it, the series began "repurposing" (rerunning) Tuesdays at 9 p.m., only days after it ran on USA on Friday nights at 10. The four-week experiment ends Sept. 3.

Played by Tony Shalhoub, Monk lost his wife in an unsolved murder, leaving him with an abnormal fear of germs, heights, crowds and, I'm sure, TV critics. He is now incapable of shaking hands with people. Umbrellas have to be just so before he can leave his apartment. He has a compulsion to touch and count virtually everything. I bet he can't step on cracks on the sidewalk, either.

The defective detective, as he is called, is socially awkward, an embarrassment to his minder, a nurse named Sharona (Bitty Schram). He will frighten a child by telling her he had a nervous breakdown and was catatonic for three years. With his mixed-nuts bag of behavioral tics and phobias, he can't be let out in public without his nurse.

He is also a brilliant dude with an ability to solve crimes. Not that it's so hard on TV, where even detectives without obsessive-compulsive disorder have a 100 percent record. Wouldn't it be refreshing to see one unsolvable crime? That would be reality TV.

Conceived and written by Andy Breckman, Monk has amazing powers of deduction. A clairvoyant, a profiler, as well as the Sherlock Holmes of the Bay area, he is so astute that Capt. Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) calls him back every week from health leave to solve another stumper.

Shalhoub's Monk is the most fascinating neurotic investigator since Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Can you imagine if Holmes had OCD along with his addiction to cocaine?

I love Shalhoub, having been a fan of his since he played the taxi driver on "Wings," a show that made me compulsively, obsessively unable to watch NBC Thursday nights at 8:30. It saved me from, among other shows too painful to recall, "Union Square," "The Single Guy," "Cursed."

Some people think Monk's quirks can grow tiresome after seeing them once or twice. The OCD establishment may view it as politically incorrect, exploiting the disorder for humor. True, he sometimes seems like an idiot savant, but he is much more interesting to watch than the village idiots who often are disguised as cops on TV.

With "Monk II," as it could be called in keeping with Shalhoub's appearances currently in "Men in Black II" and "Spy Kids 2," ABC is displaying its typically ingenious way of shooting itself in the elbow. It began repurposing episodes two weeks ago without starting with the two-hour movie that premiered on USA July 12. All the movie did was establish the uniqueness of the character.

So audiences began in the dark. What makes this guy tic? The premiere helped explain the phobic Mr. Monk, the weirdo. Some silly viewers also might have been so compulsively obsessive that they might not have wanted to start a detective story with the fourth chapter.

But this stupid network trick is not surprising to anybody who has studied ABC's self-destructive tendencies in programming. For example, there is the irony that ABC, through its own Touchstone Television studios, actually made "Monk." The network has a disorder that causes it to make quality shows and then not use them.

ABC has sold itself short before. It made "CSI" and passed on it. The vice president in charge of passing must be a mole working for CBS, where "CSI" now runs.

Using a cable-TV series is what ABC terms "innovative summer programming." Others would call it a sign of intellectual bankruptcy.

Chapter 11 in the network executive's rule book is: Cable is inferior to commercial networks. It once was unthinkable that one of the three great commercial networks would stoop to taking programming from the lowly USA Network. It makes murky the delineation between the two competing art forms, creating an identity crisis - if anybody still cares, which I doubt.

Further evidence that ABC is filing for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 is an unprecedented deal with HBO giving it a crack at HBO quality shows. Michael Eisner, head of Disney, which owns ABC, seems to be throwing in the towel, or at least a washcloth, here. The Disney board might well ask, "What are we paying our expensive development department for?"

What makes quality cable shows unique is that they are different in some ways. Not that "Monk" is totally different. One is reminded immediately of "Columbo." The lieutenant had his idiosyncrasies, everything from the rumpled look of an unmade bed with his raincoat, in whose pockets he put his cigar ashes, and his legendary forgetfulness. Peter Falk spoke softly but carried big shticks.

To steal from TV is petty larceny. But stealing from great detective literary classics is a capital crime. I call your attention to the case of Anne Perry. The illustrious mystery scrivener has written two sets of novels, one featuring the Victorian world of the Pitts - Thomas and Charlotte ("Half Moon Street") - the other featuring William Monk ("Twisted Root").

Perry's Monk, we learn in the first of 10 Monk novels ("The Face of a Stranger," 1990), is a police officer who after the Crimean War wakes up in a hospital. He had been involved in an accident and lost his memory. Gradually, Monk knows he must have been a police officer because of what his visitors are talking about to him. He doesn't want anybody to know he doesn't remember. Eventually, he leaves the force and becomes a private investigator. With his nurse, Hester, they become partners in solving insoluble crimes.

There are some striking similarities between Breckman's Monk and Perry's Monk: the names, the nurse sidekicks, the psychological interwoven with police science.

All of this is coincidental, I'm sure. It doesn't matter one way or another. It's just uncanny how these things happen in L.A., Ms. Perry in Scotland is probably thinking.

But there I go again, in my unconscious way, being obsessively compulsive in expecting TV to be as clean in creativity as a Baskerville hound's tooth.