By David Dale
November 30 2002

It seems to come earlier every year: The Silly Season, when the TV networks give up trying to attract viewers and instead dump their known failures and their unknown quantities on that part of the populace who didn't have the foresight to leave the country for Christmas. Plus cricket, tennis and carols by candlelight.

This column was planning to fill today's space with suggestions on how to make the most of this year's SS (which starts tomorrow, lasts till February and looks a bit more interesting than most SSs in living memory). But then we learned about two series that Channel Ten will show next year, and decided to begin by time-travelling further ahead than the next nine weeks.
And how's this for another concept: a comedy/mystery about a cross between Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets and Peter Falk in Columbo? Don't know about you, but an obsessive-compulsive-phobic detective is right up this column's alley. Especially when he's played by Tony Shalhoub, one of the greatest support acts in movie history. Shalhoub was Denzel Washington's Arab-American translator in The Siege and the shopkeeper whose head grew back in Men In Black and the shortsighted toymaker/ mastermind in Spy Kids and the slick lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There and the chef in Big Night and the engineer who fell in love with the alien in Galaxy Quest.

Shalhoub finally agreed this year to be in a TV series, and he plays Adrian Monk, suspended from the San Francisco police force because he was too pernickety. Now in private practice and assisted by a psychiatric nurse only slightly less eccentric than himself, he lets his neurotic attention to detail solve the cases. Monk has been well reviewed in America, and the clips on Ten's preview reel suggest it's clever and charming - the kind of twist on a standard formula that makes you think TV might be worth watching again.

The last time such innovation came out of Hollywood was when somebody pitched the notion of "a comedy about a Mafia boss who consults a psychiatrist". The result was Analyse This at the movies and The Sopranos on TV. Channel Nine starts a new series of the latter on Monday at 9.30pm, having apparently discarded its claim that it can't show gutsy programs (such as Six Feet Under and The West Wing) any earlier than 10.30pm because only an elitist (and presumably insomniac) minority want to see them. We must thank the SS for giving us both The Sopranos and a good night's sleep.