"Monk's" Tony Shalhoub and Bitty Shram is one of the drollest and sweetest pairings in modern television.

By JEFF SIMON
7/21/2002

If ever there was a fellow who deserved to be the star of the smartest new TV series since CBS' "CSI," it's Tony Shalhoub, star of USA's absolutely delightful "Monk." (The show airs at 10 p.m. Friday. Last Friday's episode will be be rerun this week at midnight Monday, 7 p.m. Tuesday, 6 p.m. and midnight Thursday. You almost have to try to miss it.) Lest you ask why Shalhoub is so deserving, try this experiment: walk into any room in America - Hungarian restaurant, allergist's waiting room, suburban living room during a cocktail party, supermarket - and scream excitedly "Tony Shalhoub is here! Tony Shalhoub is here!" And then count the number of baffled people who respond, "Tony who?"

Tony Shalhoub: The delightfully befuddled cab driver on the TV sitcom "Wings." The fellow whose turn as a slick, patronizing lawyer who somehow uses Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in defense of his client was the only splatter of color in the iron-gray Coen Brothers movie "The Man Who Wasn't There." ¢ The actor whose choice bit as the dire street-corner prophet in Angelina Jolie's comedy "Life or Something Like It" gets the whole plot started. The good sport who keeps cropping up with two heads (and wall-eyes in each one) in the "Men in Black" movies. Tony Shalhoub, the ultra-smart character actor who is a priceless bright spot in every movie or TV show he appears in, even the ones that are already replete with other bright spots. As far as I can tell, there is no patron saint of character actors - no St. Martin of Balsam or St. Sidney of Greenstreet - who blesses and protects the non-starring working stiffs who bring pure charisma, talent and charm to movie after movie, TV show after TV show. If you have to ask why Natasha Henstridge was given her own TV show to star in (as she was last night in "She Spies"), you need to see an ophthalmologist in a hurry. If you wonder why Shalhoub was (and is even a "Monk" executive producer besides), you'll get your answer in the first 10 minutes of every episode of "Monk."

He plays Adrian Monk, a traumatized police detective who is a massively phobic, obsessive compulsive, neurotic mess - so subject to anxieties, terrors, and sudden behavioral fits and seizures that he can't function without a practical nurse at his side. And yet he can tell, after two minutes in a hotel room, that it was once inhabited by someone who smokes menthol cigarettes - Newports or Salems. In a stroke of purest delight, Monk's nurse Sharona is played by Bitty Shram, a wry and wonderful actress who was - until a week ago - just as unknown as Tony Shalhoub before "Wings." This, I submit, is one of the drollest and sweetest pairings in modern television - playing a man and his nurse, out on the streets battling crime together. If that isn't the funniest new millennium variation on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, I'll eat my remote. In our endlessly over-sensitive times, I can conceive, of course, of those genuinely afflicted taking exception to "Monk," but if they stopped and thought about it for half a second, they'd see clearly that this is the most lovable portrait of mental illness that television has ever offered us.

The effect of all the jokes about Monk's phobias and obsessive compulsive tics is love and compassion for them all. The pilot had one of the sweetest endings I've ever seen in a TV debut. Monk and his brassy, plucky nurse had solved a case and he'd been reinstated to the force. They meet on a bridge to walk home. As they walk away from us, we see their backs receding into the background. Monk - as he always does - touches and counts all the bridge lamp posts. When a passionate discussion with his nurse distracts him for a second, she interrupts after he's touched a couple more and says with all the affection and patience in the world, "You missed one Adrian." There are first-rate TV shows that never hit a moment that wry and tender in their whole run. It's good for the world when people like Tony Shalhoub wind up in the winner's circle. Meanwhile, back at the USA Network's sudden discovery of actors where no one else was looking, consider the distinctly lesser but still appealing Stephen King offshoot series, "The Dead Zone." When some of us first saw Anthony Michael Hall, he was the gangly, talkative, horny wise guy in "Sixteen Candles," all mouth and not a lick of sense attached to a lot of bones, a large Adam's Apple and not much else. In the years since, the skinny teen jerk has filled out into a thick-necked, hulking hockey defenseman. With his ominous protuberant eyes, he looks like the last guy in the world you'd want to see all coked-up at the end of a dark alley. And that's, more or less, how crummy movies typed him until "The Dead Zone" came along. Remarkably, he's turned into a reasonably sensitive, witty and sympathetic actor.

He plays a fellow who wakes up from a six-year coma to discover that his girlfriend (Nicole DeBoer) has had his child but married another guy and that he is now bedevilled by psychic and clairvoyant powers. He and DeBoer remain pals while he tries to figure out how to build a coherent life around his dreary newfound gifts. The result is one of the more odd man-and-his-ex relationships on TV. Don't look now, but the USA Network may have figured out some stuff about men and women that "Sex and the City" hasn't gotten around to yet.