jcjs333 I see Amazon has 'Psyche' now which i binged on some years ago and Psyche is awesome' with great cameos and acting and funny. I'd pass by watching Monk i don't know why. I'm on Ep 14 of 7th season after about 7 days. I'm totally immersed in the pleasure of this series. I bet they have great out takes. I'm not going to say much about it. Ya just have to check it out and i trust you'll be as pleased. The show is 'one of a kind'. Someone told me they like Columbo better. Peter falk is great and the show was a hoot but it was more of a serious show and is different compared to Monk. Monk is 'Charlie Chan', 'Columbo', 'Sid Ceasar', 'Red Skelton', 'Red Buttons', 'Jack Benny', 'Flip Wilson', 'George Burns and Gracy Allen' , 'Steve Allen' and old them classic one of a kind good ole awesome humor. And 'clowning'. Monk is a modern day 'Red Skelton' on steroids. Also, i've gotten to the point where i turn on a series and i stop watching it if they use 'f--k'. The 'f-word' has lost it's meaning. I watched over 110 episodes of 'Monk' before i heard Capt Stoddlmeir say '...people come to a football game and get all 'f----d' up. It took hours and hours to hear 'f'. Tin Star starts out with the f word a dozen times said by the whole family. F word ought to be used sparingly and with gusto hitting a person's gut with it like the 'c' word. Nowadays, i think people who say 'f' are simply illiterate idiots and writers are bad who use it. They can't write. 'Death in Paradise', BBC, is a great series like Monk in it's humor and wind up at the end. But, MONK is Monk and Monk is a great actor and a great 'clown' making people laugh at him, with him and realize the humor in life. Sad, to see the show go. RED SKELTON is the first hit i got while watching it. Monk can act, though. Great job.

Robert D. Ruplenas I have fallen in love with this show by way of the cable reruns. It's wonderful in every way. The concept of the show is brilliant; a detective show in which the detective, although brilliant, is neither suave, brave, not debonair. He is truly a psychologically damaged person. And although his foibles and phobias are often played for laughs, the fact of his being destroyed by his wife's death is always a serious element of the show. The supporting players are excellent, particularly Ted Levine as Cpt. Stottlemeyer. The character of Randy is a bit gratuitously annoying but you can't have everything. The scriptwriting is some of the best around, with many subtle witticisms and some great cultural parody. And it is never straight out comedy; the tragic nature of Monk's mental affliction is always present, and the endings always have a gentle touch. The crime mysteries themselves are most often not the point of the show. They are merely the McGuffin - in Hitchcocks's phrase - on which to hang a drama about character relationships. Just a great, great show.

Alec Strauss Monk has been my favorite show ever since I first saw it. I have watched the series three times through, and have plans to watch it again. The creators of Monk have made gold, a show for the ages. If you are not sure about watching the show, and looking for reasons to watch it or not to watch it my biased opinion I say watch it. Each episode contains a mystery that captures your attention, and the writers keep an overlapping story line throughout the hole series that makes you want to watch the next episode right away. All of the main characters and sub-characters are well developed, and strong in their own right. I absolutely loved this show, and recommend it to any one that says they enjoy crime dramas. In my opinion it is one of the funniest crime dramas out there as well. Tony Shalhoub become my favorite actor from this show, he plays such a difficult character with such perfection, it is just amazing.

grizzledgeezer ion * runs large blocks of "Monk" on Saturday, and I've watched more episodes than I care to admit. I've long had doubts about the "quality" of the program, and yesterday's transition from the end of the series to the beginning provided a chance to get a better idea of what was good and bad about it.At its most-basic, "Monk" is yet another attempt to clone "Sherlock Holmes". Adrian Monk has Holmes-like powers of deduction, which make the police look less-than-competent. Even the intelligent and level-headed Leland Stottlemeyer is too quick to accept the obvious. Yet Monk's seemingly amazing skills -- which are supposed to the result of his OCD -- are actually based on nothing more than careful observation and thoughtful analysis, something any bright person is capable of.To put it a bit differently... the conceit that Monk's detective skills are largely a result of his OCD is absurd. Sherlock Holmes never credited his skills to cocaine, but rather that he used his native intelligence well. He summed up his technique in his remark to Watson: "You look but you do not see."If there's any doubt about the Holmes connection, note that (at least in the early episodes), Monk mimics Holmes by drawing conclusions from tiny bits of evidence (such as noting that Stottlemeyer isn't getting along well with his wife). There's also the fact that when Dr Kroger dies, his replacement is a Dr Bell -- Sherlock Holmes was modeled after Dr Joseph Bell.Monk's implausibly unique genius is a strike against the series, though not necessarily a fatal one. Almost as bad is the insufferably stupid Randy Disher. It's impossible to believe he's a lieutenant, indeed, that he could have earned //any// position on the police force. He makes Chester Goode look like Niels Bohr. He is perhaps supposed to represent Nigel Bruce's Dr-Watson-as-bumbling-idiot character.Another problem is that Monk in invariably involved with murders, almost always committed by more-or-less intelligent people with strong motives (money, revenge, etc). In real life, such murders are uncommon; the number which occur in San Francisco in two seasons is less than the number in the entire country in a decade. In fairness, this focus on murder has long been a problem with most crime series; "The Rockford Files" stands out as one exception.Of course, "Monk" is supposed to be clever entertainment, not something to make us think. So none of these problems justifies an a-priori condemnation.Few TV series maintain a consistently high level of quality (it's easy to be bad all the time), and "Monk" is no exception. The pilot movie and the earliest episodes show a somewhat different "take" on the characters than the bulk of the episodes.There's the obvious friction between Stottlemeyer and Monk. Leland rightly feels that respect for the police might not survive a loose cannon who desperately longs to be reinstated. This friction naturally erodes as Monk shows he's almost always right.The most-significant changes involve Monk. He's initially far more sober (due mostly to unresolved grief over his wife's death) -- and self-assured -- than he will be later. His OCD -- the raison d'etre for the series -- goes from being "only" an important part of his personality, to becoming virtually its whole definition, with a resulting imbalance in his behavior.Monk moves from being a moderately plausible serious character to a largely comic one, whom we are sometimes on the verge of laughing //at// -- or wanting to punch. It's difficult to understand why someone so intelligent makes so little progress in overcoming his phobias and OCD.The creators bit off more than they could chew, and I suspect they quickly gave up trying to make Adrian Monk a truly believable character. Perhaps he should have been portrayed as an actively irritating person tolerated only for his crime-solving skills (not unlike Sherlock Holmes). But viewers are unlikely to watch a TV series about an annoying person (remember "Buffalo Bill"?), so it was easy to fall back on "Monk as semi-lovable buffoon".What's remarkable is that Tony Shaloub survived this series unscathed, mostly because of his restraint in playing a character who could have looked even more ridiculous than he was. Shaloub is a much better actor than he had a chance to demonstrate here. Perhaps someday we will see him in a TV series worthy of his talents.So... "Monk" is not a bad series, and as time-wasters go, above average. But it's merely "good", and not at all what it might have been.* Its slogan is "positively entertaining". Apparently, they've never heard of negatively charged ions.