Yeah, that was a tragic mistake on the writers’ part. His origin from the book/movie was so good, too!
The initial kick was that he kept calling in police tips for the reward based on the information he could just gleam seeing it on TV. They ended up suspecting him of committing the crimes because of the details he knew, so he said he found them out because he was a psychic.
[Bolding mine] That was my biggest issue. I think in the very first episode Stottlemeyer talked about how before Trudy died Monk was a fairly normal guy who just liked things neat and organized. But later on in the show the would have flashbacks of Monk showing him being a weirdo even as a kid.
Baldrick in Blackadder (and his stupidity) definitely counts.
It’s a bit of a weird case as the characters all change between the first and second season (with Blackadder getting cleverer and more cunning and Baldrick getting dumber)
But even between Blackadder II and Blackadder goes Forth, the number of dumb jokes about Baldrick being dumb increases.
It’s really its own category, but Hawkeye becomes such a “caring asshole” in the latter half of MASH. He always had a bit of “care” in him, but he was mainly the lead asshole. After Alan Alda got control of the character he became unwatchable.
I sorta disagree with griffin1977 - Baldrick getting dumber and dumber was on purpose, not because the writers got lazy.
That one at least can be chalked up to the various Baldricks and Blackadders being different characters.
That’s too bad. I think it was one of the better series wrap ups that has been done.
Summary
He discovers something that allows him to solve Trudy’s murder. This resolution lets him heal enough to come back to the police department. He is still Monk. He is still quirky and weird but he is able to function in society.
Monk was funny from day one. They leaned into it more later but it was never a straight mystery.
I think I’ve reached this point with the newest season of Letterkenney. The characters have always had various quirks that helped define them, but in this season, they seem to be nothing but their quirks.
I disagree with the last line, but I kinda gave up on the show around then, so…
Sure, a lot of Mystery shows have some humor in them.
They did change Spikeification to Badass Decay (kind of quasi-parallel to Flanderization, where formerly prominent character loses a former definiing trait).
I think you are remembering it wrong. The creator and main writer of the show is a comedy writer. The murder was always central to the plot but the comedy was always there. It was always a hell of a lot more than “some humor.”
I feel a little like Baldrick every morning. Each day I feel a little stupider than I did the day before, but I’m too stupid to realize it. Thank God I don’t drink Coffee.
Oh, my god, we’re Flanderizing ourselves!
I know I am. After a year or two of hermiting, I’m definitely more quirky (because my “normie” traits are out of practice).
I had always thought each subsequent Baldrick was a descendent of his predecessor. So I just put his continued dumbing down down to faded genes.
I think these kind of changes are almost always inevitable when a sitcom runs a long time. You start to run out of stories, the veteran writers move on to other shows and are replaced by newer, less experienced writers whose primary influence is the earlier seasons of the show, broader characters become easier to write for, also sometimes the audience latches onto it so the writers play it up. I am not sure any show that has lasted more than a few seasons hasn’t gone through this to one degree or another.
At the end of season 4 Baldrick had a cunning and subtle plan. A plan as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University. Unfortunately we didn’t get to hear the plan but that does imply he wasn’t too dumb.
Absolutely. At the start of the series, he was played much as the character was played in the movie. He was a smart guy who knew how to get things done amid all the chaos, often using a bit of chicanery to do so. As time went by, the writers morphed his character into what you correctly called a “man child” who drank Grape Nehi and slept with a teddy bear.
According to Burghoff, that was his idea, and he loved how it played out.
Thanks for that link! Interesting that it was his idea to soften the character. I still think they took it a little too far, but that’s just my opinion. Most of the characters from the movie were somewhat TV-ized, in that they were not as cynical, cruel and crazy as they were depicted in the movie, because characters like that would never have flown on TV of the 1970s and 80s.
My opinion of MASH in general was always colored by my reaction to the movie, which I saw when it was first released. I thought the movie was hilarious, but as a comedy, it’s very dark and cruel. Most people I know who love the TV series have either never seen the movie or hated it when they did. The series was one of the best ever to grace the home screen. It’s timeless.
I agree. Not only did they change the overall tone to something more suited to a laugh track, but over time it really became more and more the Hawkeye Pierce Show.