I tried to review Monk. Here's what happened...

 

I've now watched every episode of Monk because it's all on Netflix and like Everest ...it's there.

Although I remember it going out at the time I don't think the BBC paid for all the episodes so I missed a lot and this filled in a lot of the gaps ...making it more of a continuing narrative.  Apparently the project spent a long time in "development hell" before being green lit because they found it really difficult to find someone to play the central character.  I'm not surprised... even in the more innocent times of the 90s it must have been difficult to find someone to play someone with every phobia going without it becoming offensive, corny or just naff.  Monk's world isn't really real but a kind of bizarre melodrama posing as a procedural.  Although we know it is a comedy it is just on the edge of believability... and there's also the dark edge that someone always dies (sometimes quite graphically) every week.  As Columbo used to say "they don't even bring us in unless someone's dead."

Monk is of course surrounded by other eccentric characters.  The avuncular Captain Leland Stottlemeyer with his disintegrating marriage to a TV producer and the wide eyed innocent Randy Disher who are there to do the plodding police work (the influence actually is Sherlock Holmes with Lestrade being the model for Stottlemeyer) ...and his two assistants - first Sharona Fleming and then Natalie Teeger - who act as the audience surrogates.  Bitty Schram and her ancient Volvo are particularly good at grounding the series with a sense of reality.  Natalie Teeger is deliberately much posher... There's too much going on in Monk to actually really review it in any meaningful sense.  It tries so many ways to stay original - although one feels in series 8 they're starting to run out of road ... how many variations on the same basic story structures can be managed...? but there are so many gems ... Randy and Natalie trying to watch a football match on a TV stolen from the evidence room, Jarrad Paul's scene stealing performances as Kevin Dorfman, Sarah Silverman as the obsessive fan, Teeger's attempts to turn Monk into a PI, Brad Garrett as the builder, Sharona breaking it to Natalie she was paid more, Agoraphobic Ambrose, Monk's father, Jason Gray-Stanford's physical comedy moments and his "buddies in blue" .... and, of course, the unforgettable penultimate episode cliffhanger.  

I was going to try and write a meaningful review but ... here's what happened...... a jumble.

It's a jumble out there...