Sorry to be the bearer of only bad news, but according to this Hollywood Reporter article, Monk will be wrapping up after the upcoming season.
Unlike other shows I listed in another thread here, Monk still has high ratings but they want to go out while things are going well, and the price of the show is starting to make it unrealistic to keep going. Who knows, maybe one of the larger networks will pick it up? Just a WAG.
I will miss the show - yeah, the plots were sometimes paper thin and Monk’s tics were sometimes borderline annoying - but at least you got to sort of care for the characters.
Wonder if Monk will finally find Trudy’s killer in the last episode?
And will that “cure him” of his phobias?
I stopped watching a season or two ago. It was, I thought at the time, becoming stupid in several ways. But I would definitely watch the final run up to and including the last episode, to see questions like this addressed.
For the first year it was on the air, Monk also ran on ABC. (The show is co-produced by Touchstone Pictures- now ABC Studios- which, like ABC, is owned by Disney.)
The show has become terribly uninteresting over the past season or two, so I’m glad it’ll be wrapping up (I’d have dropped it if it weren’t an off-season show). That said, I’ll be glad to get closure on Trudy’s case (which the writers will give us, if they don’t want an angry mob outside their homes).
Doubt it…he was like that pre-Trudy, so I don’t see how that would do it.
He was somewhat phobic when Trudy was alive, but he was still able to work as a detective for the SFPD. So I hope that in the last episode, he resolves the issue of Trudy’s murder and gets his badge back. Perhaps he’ll also find a new love.
This is sad news. The majority of my time at work is spent fantasizing about Natalie following me around all day calling me Mr. Clivas. Ah well, there’s always dvd.
He was not like he is now before Trudy died. According to another cop who worked with him ‘He was always a little strange. He had the cleanest glove compartment you ever saw.’ (I forget which episode it was in). But he was able to function fully as a detective and human being without an aid or a psychiatrist or constant panic attacks.
BTW
As somebody who takes meds for OCD and Social Anxiety Disorder, I find Monk to be a very realistic depiction of mental illness. I’ve never known anybody with as many compulsions as Adrian, but other than that it’s a very good portrayal of OCD.
Well, the good news is, the final season will debut in July of 2009. If USA holds true to form, they’ll run eight episodes in the summer of 2009 and return with the final eight episodes in January of 2010. So it would be almost two more years before we have to say good-bye to our favorite defective detective.
I pretty much quit watching the show when they introduced the “annoying neighbor”, the guy who won the lottery, and lost it all when he made two bad marriages. ONE annoying guy (Monk) is interesting, and makes for a good story. Two annoying guys, one of whom doesn’t really add to the storyline, is just too much for me.
Well, compared to the other stuff on TV Monk is still one of the better shows. Admittedly the recent quality has been up and down and lacks some of the ingenuity found in earlier episodes. One thing I do miss this season was Stanley Kamel who played Monk’s shrink. Hector Elizondo is a fine replacement, but Kamel’s Dr. Kroger was a steadying influence on Monk and his passing earlier this year has left a looming void in the show.
Monk was a great premise, with great acting, killed for me by the weak plots. It is supposed to be a mystery/detective show, but – particularly in the later episodes – there doesn’t seem to be any real mystery or detecting.
Originally the show seemed to run on the Sherlock Holmesian idea that a compulsively detail-oriented detective can find the one thread out of place and pull it to unravel the whole scheme. Even then, the plots seemed to have been built by thinking of the clue, constructing the scheme to be unraveled around that, tossing in a little conflict with Capt. Stottlemeyer and Randy, adding a Monk quirk or two, and baking for 15 minutes over low heat. Truly interesting twists were few and far between.
Still, as I watched later episodes – fewer and fewer as time went on – it seemed that the lightly-baked plots have devolved from focusing on the mysteries, such as they were, to: “that Mr. Monk, he’s so funny.” Nonetheless, I always thought Tony Shaloub played his character brilliantly, and the rest of the cast was superb as well.
So, I’m not too heartbroken that Monk will be sailing into the sunset.
I believe at that point they were testing out the chemistry of several characters with whom they were thinking they would replace Sharona. Annoying neighbor was one, mean nurse friend of Sharona was another, and Sharona’s sister was a third. Luckily, none of these made it and Natalie was cast.
Monk is one of those shows that turns up on cable, Saturday afternoons, in the UK. It turns it from being compulsive or handy viewing into something that’s on to fill the void when you suddenly find yourself with spare time and nothing of importance to do. Not that it makes it a bad series, just not one that I got a chance to get into.
Friday, while wandering aimlessly across the Paramount lot with a couple of colleagues, we happened upon an external shot for Monk - they’d just wrapped and were in the process of dismantling the set. Obviously, being the tactless clod that I am, I started dissecting the shortcomings in the writing in recent episodes and why I felt the show was lacking, lately - until my colleague jabbed me in the ribs and pointed - to the unmistakable profile of Tony Shalhoub standing 10 feet away. Smooth move, Spiny. I deftly checked that my ID badge wasn’t showing and made a fast exit - but I am happy to learn that I wasn’t speaking anything but the conventional wisdom.
I’m sad to hear this–I still liked Monk, even though it hasn’t been as good lately. The one this season where he bought a new house was a low point in the series, I think.
Natalie is one of my biggest TV crushes–I have liked Traylor Howard since she was the hot girl on Boston Common. I hope she lands another good role in television.
What actually worries me most about this is how it will affect Psych. I LOVE that show and I’m sure it has benefitted from following Monk. This could hurt its numbers.
I expect the production company that turns out Monk will do as they did with a handful of other shows. After five or six years they will turn out a couple of Monk 90 minuters per year.