"Monk" Season 8 thread

Not returning until August 7th this year. Sort of eliminates the point of having summer counterprogramming. I've heard rumors that's its going to run straight though, opposite network programming, rather than coming back in January for the second half of the season.

Re: "Monk" Season 8 thread

Adam,

If what you've heard is true, would this mean that the DVDs for the seventh season might come out sooner? That would be a bonus in my book.

Re: "Monk" Season 8 thread

"Here's what happened."

I think Monk will run straight through, but Psych will still be split in half. Still, kind of a late start, running well into the fall season, and adding more to my plate. At least, I will have time to catch up on Season 7 episodes on DVD, before the premiere.

Re: "Monk" Season 8 thread

Walter,

And bravo -- your post was even in black and white -- sort of.

Some very broad overview spoilers:

Warning Spoiler! Click to show The season begins Friday.

Do we know for sure that it will run straight through rather than being split into two "mini seasons?"

Sorry about the other thread. I did a search and it didn't report anything. That is what I get for trusting in machines. :)

For future reference, what is the best way to find if a thread exists? I did a search for "Monk Season" and it showed some of the older ones, but not season 8. Maybe it is because Monk is in quotes in this thread?

Anyway, sorry about that.

The important thing is Monk is back tomorrow!!!
 

Don't worry about. The new search is much quirkier than the old software where it would bring up all of the thread titles with the words you type in on a New Thread screen. I was convinced that I'd seen a Monk Season 8 thread (apparently because I started it) but I had to go back like five pages in the search results to find it.

Either way, thanks for the reminder about the season premiere tomorrow!

Yes, thanks for the reminder! I would not have remembered it, I don't think.

Time to get another season set, too. :)

I really enjoyed tonight's episode.  What with all of The Brady Bunch references, I was having a fun time of it.  And I loved how Monk solved the case while he was 'dreaming.'  Very nice episode all around.

And next week, the Brady Bunch connection continues somewhat, when another of that show's alumni -- Christine Baranski -- guest stars on Psych.

I had a wicked headache tonight, which almost certainly impacted my experience. But tonight's episode felt kind of prefunctory to me, although I did enjoy the running gag about just what an unimaginably huge slut the former child actress was. I'm not sure what to make of next week's episode from the preview.

Yes, good spin on the normal solution style.

Did anyone else think that Natalie was 'gone' in the house for quite some time?  I was curious where she went to before I heard Monk call out her name repeatedly.

I loved the episode and got a kick out of fun they had with the "child star tell-all book" genre.  (Although Maureen McCormack's Brady tome is freshest in everybody's mind, I recall some pretty shocking and salacious stuff from Burt Ward's Batman book, and assorted Partridge Family memoirs.)  Elizabeth Perkins seems to have put on a few pounds since I last saw her, but at least most of them landed in the right place. 

Monk trying to figure out the mirror on the ceiling was great, too.  As was solviing the mystery with the DVD set.  The final reveal was handled very well.  The whole recreation of the series was brilliant.  Of course it was obvious from the start that Perkins's character was behind the "threats", but I originally thought she was just trying to drum up publicity for her book tour.  When she killed the "nobody" I was thrown off the trail and wondering if the handwritng of the bookstore owner would mtach the notes and lead to some other connection.  Then I remembered that the dead guy's job history included a stint at an accounting firm and all became clear again.  


It is really scary that you know this.    My first thought was "Baranski?  The Brady Bunch?"  But then I checked the IMDB and sure enough, she did appear in a single episode.  

Nitpick:  When they were watching the show at Perkin's place, the image filled the entire 16:9 screen and everything appeard in normal proportions.  The only way that could happen if the episodes had been remastered in widescreen from the original film a la Hogan's Heroes on UHD.  Yet when Natalie and Monk watch the discs on his 4:3 TV, the show also fills the screen and is in normal proportions when it should be letterboxed.  Obviously impossible.  And yes, I know that noticing this is almost as geeky as knowing that Christine Baranski once did a gues shot on The Brady Bunch,. 

Regards,

Joe

Joe,

Well, The Slumber Caper is our four-year old's favorite episode of The Brady Bunch thus far.  She once watched it three straight times, and wanted to watch it again. :)

I actually discovered the bit about Baranski several months ago when I was researching whether Julia-Louise Dreyfus was on an episode of The Brady Bunch.



Edited by Ockeghem - 8/9/2009 at 04:36 pm GMT

First thing that I thought of while watching the ep, while THEY were watching the ep.

Me too. You know you're a HTF geek when the first thing you notice is that they're watching an old TV show in a modified aspect ratio (MAR). Unacceptable!

Anyone else notice that the picture of Trudy was the first actress to play her? Odd. Good episode.

They've never had a lot of fidelity when it comes to Trudy. One of the parallels of featuring a character frozen in time on a show that lasts eight seasons.

After a lackluster opening, this was one had dramatic heft similar to the earlier episodes. I know Tony Shaloub takes a lot of heat for getting an Emmy nom every year, but he earns it with moments like when Monk realizes that the man's wife has changed. His whole body language changed in a way that was really quite profound. It was also interesting to see an episode with hardly any Natalie in it. We haven't had one of those in a while.

Next week's episode looks like it's back to the lighthearted fare. I do enjoy me some James Brolin, though, so it has that going for it.

This week's episode is the Monk I like to watch.  It's about him, his character, and why he is the way he is.  It's not the fumbling bafoon solves crimes gimmick that too many episodes fall into.  It was about him, and I loved it.

Perhaps that actress returned to shoot the Trudy material for this season (which will probably be more extensive than in past years.)


But you can't do that too much with an open-ended series.  If you focus every episode on Trudy's death and Monk's history, you can frustrate the audience by emphasizing the obvious fact that her case isn't being solved.  A show like this, with a pre-set end point (the one-armed man is found, the ship makes it home, Monk solves Trudy's murder and returns to the force - or doesn't) has to do a lot of stand-alone stories, because in a sense, the whole show is a stall.  It becomes all about not getting to the climax that is contained in the underlying premise.  (One of the reasons that viewers of Lost - a show that was designed as a continuing story where each episode would advance a number of storylines, including one over-arching one - get frustrated at one point was that the producers were asked to keep the series going longer than they had intended and they had to do this kind of "stall".  As soon as they had a fixed end-date, they could start to build toward its climax and the fan's responded.)

Because Monk's writers are similarly working towards a definite conclusion, they can also now put more emphasis on Monk, Trudy and "curing", or at leat mitigating, his OCD symptoms to the point where he can at least be offered his old job back. 

Regards,

Joe

Are they returning to Las Vegas, or is it unrelated to that?  I loved that episode.  Besides Monk and Stottlemeyer shining, the Dish and Natalie were quite funny in it.

One of my favorite lines from the episode?  Monk, when playing Black Jack.  "Sweet."

I agree, however if you compare the standalone episodes in the first few seasons to the stand alone episodes today, there's a huge difference in tone. The humor came from a much darker place back then. Last season had a few episodes like that -- "Mr. Monk and the Genius", "Mr. Monk Falls in Love", "Mr. Monk and the Miracle", "Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door" and of course "Mr. Monk Fights City Hall" -- but these have become the exception, not the rule. Most of those had nothing to do with the overarching mystery of the show, but were effective because they provided circumstances that allowed a tragic aspect of his character to manifest. They illuminated his character. The early episodes were all like that; most of the new episodes are, as Randy said, gimmicky: Put Monk into some surreal new mishap and watch how his phobias go nuts. That's the shows hook but it is, in my mind, the less interesting part. "Foreign Man" had no exciting new locales or big set pieces. Just two men who would normally have nothing to do with each other bonding over tragic events that have shaped who they've become.

Unfortunately, judging by the episode titles for this season:

Warning Spoiler! Click to show It looks like we aren't going to get into the meat of the series arc until the last five episodes.

Shoot, I'm sorry. I was posting in the "Monk" and "Psych" threads at the same time and confused guest stars. Brolin is not reprising his role as the lunatic casino owner on "Monk", he's guest starring on this upcoming Friday's episode of "Psych." Daniel Stern will be the big guest star on this week's "Monk", playing a sharper than average rural county sheriff in "Mr. Monk and the U.F.O."

Adam,

No problem.  I do that on occasion, and oddly enough, most often with these two shows.

I like Brolin as well, dating back to the days he was on Marcus Welby, M.D.  I'm pleased he will be on Psych. :)

That makes sense, actually.  The shows are both comedy-mysteries that air back-to-back on the same network.  Most people who watch both aren't going to stop by to post here during the brief commercial break, but will come here to read and post right after wards, with both shows fresh in mind.  (Heck, I time shift and never watch the two live, but I always watch them together.)

This week's nitpick: - the UFO geeks talk about there being "no inhabitable planets" in the Andromeda galaxy.  The one of them says something about a pair on nebulae there, as if their presence proves anything one way or the other about the possibility of intelligent life, and then finally one of them rejects Andromeda as a point of origin for the UFO because it would take "5,000 years to get here."  

Why is it that when most screenwriters get within fifty mile of anything remotely science- or SF-related they become lazy, stupid or both.  The Andromeda galaxy is about two million light years from here, way too far to detect planets, or nebulae, for that matter.  (Hell, we thought the place was a nebula until Hubble - the guy, not the telescope - correct everybody.)  And the UFO geeks must know the top speed of the alien spacecraft if they can calculate the a two million light year journey is going to take around five thousand years. 

Obviously the writer started with a familiar-sounding name and then tried to write a geeky-sounding argument without bothering to look "Andromeda galaxy" up to see if what he was writing made any sense.  That's one level of lazy.  Maybe the writer figured that the facts didn't matter because the characters could also get the facts wrong.  And that's the other level of lazy:  He or she (or they) wrote about a subculture (UFO enthusiasts) without reading anything about them at all.   Granted they were a comic (and plot) device, and this wasn't a documentary, but comedy is always better when it is very specific.  Satire works best when it hews closest to the thing being mocked.  It could only have added to the humor if they'd been able to do some jokes based on what more of the real UFO fringe people are like.  (At a minimum they would have realized that these are the kind of people that would know all about the Andromeda galaxy. )

Compare this week's CSI rerun, where they absolutely "get" the SF fan subculture (and do a wonderful job recreating the look of a Trek-style 1960s TV show.)

Nitpick aside, and I thought it was a very good episode.  Boom Boom was great (especially when he talked into the hammer) and Monk's reaction to the "internet people" was hilarious.  I also liked the pan to reveal Natalie and the sheriff standing just a few feet away during Monk's dramatic walk out of the desert.  Finally there was Natalie and Leland having the little "You know, it would explain a lot..." reaction to the idea of Monk as an alien.  (And Natalie trying to check for a belly-button at the end.)

Regards,

Joe

I really liked this episode as well; I found season three at Target for $19, so I've been watching a couple episodes a night to get through the summer lull. This episode compared very favorably to what is arguably the show's best season. There are two kind of stand-alone episodes, by which I mean episodes that don't relate to the larger Trudy mythology: stand-alone episodes that make fun of Monk for his failings, and stand-alone episodes that observe the way Monk reacts to unusual and uncomfortable new situations. I don't like the first type because I think they force Tony Shaloub to play the character too broadly. This episode was firmly in the second category. Everything at the body shop was classic, and Daniel Stern's character was neither the country bumpkin nor the incredible genius hiding disguised by a laconic Southern accent that we usually get when urban shows have a rural episode. He was Andy Griffith meets Leland Stottlemeyer, which is exactly what the episode required.

The whole gag about Monk's belly button definitely highlighted the contrast between Sharona and Natalie, for me though. Sharona was such a developed character from right off the bat that they could have never used that gag with her. Natalie is, like Stottlemeyer, a reliable straight man there to react to Monk. By contrast, the humor from the first 2.5 seasons was as much about Monk reacting to Sharona as it was to Sharona reacting to Monk. I'm not sure one is better than the other, but it definitely had a profound impact on the structure of the show.

There was also a difference in the power dynamic.  Sharona was a nurse and she was Monk's caretaker when he was at his most dysfunctional, before he was able to return to any kind of duty.  Even after he took up private detective work, Sharona always treated him as her patient, almost as a child.  It didn't matter that he was writing the checks.  You pay the bill in the hospital, too, but there's never any question about whether you or the medical staff is iin charge.  Monk may be a genius, but in his relationship with Sharona he was an equal at best, in part because of their history together.  (That history is one reason why Sharona was such a developed character from day one.  We never saw her relationship with Monk begin and grow, we picked them up in the middle of their mutual story.)  At bottom, depsite their obvious fondness for one another, Sharona's relationship was always that of a good nurse with a bad patient. 

With Natalie, Monk is unquestionably the boss, even if he is heavily dependent on her.   She didn't come in with the same history, and she doesn't have the professional credentials that can let her automatically take charge in certain situations.  Monk would sometimes yield to Sharona as a medical professional.  Natalie had to gradually create a relationship with Monk that let her carve out her own area of authority.  She did this by repeatedly demonstrating grit, and loyalty and sheer competence.  She can now sometimes get Monk to back down because she's established a track record of being right.  And sometimes she can do it by emotionally blackmailing him.  There is something warmer and more human in their relationship.  I can't see Sharona getting Monk to help explain the birds and the bees to Benjie the way Natalie did with Julie.  Because she is less obviously tough than Sharona, Natalie can sometimes tear up or otherwise show vulnerability and get her way with Monk, which Sharona neither could nor would even try. 

As you say, I'm not sure either is better than the other.  Both relationships and characters have been very interesting, and I'm glad they went in a completely different direction when they lost Sharona instead of trying to replicate that character.  (That approach usually works best:  See Frank Burns vs. Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H or John Kelly vs. Bobby Simone on NYPD Blue.) 

The Futon Critic has a nice interview with Shaloub about the last season.  It contains minor spoilers for the over-all shape of the season and when certain events will fall, but no specifics.  Interesting read. 

Regards,

Joe

Part of this is because of the nature of the parent-child relationships at play. Sharona was a struggling working-class single parent coming off a nasty breakup with a dud husband. All that Sharona and Benjy had were each other, and Monk was an intrusion onto that. By contrast, Natalie is a trust fund baby and the widow of a beloved husband. The latter difference left Natalie much more open to acknowledging the hole missing in her life, because she didn't have to put Julie's father behind them as a matter of emotional survival. Benjy was, like most people, constantly frustrated by Monk. On the other hand Julie, in addition to being raised by an improbably nice mother, is introduced to Monk as the man who saved her goldfish. She took the time to understand him, which led her to both appreciate how special Monk's love for Trudy is and navigate delicately around his quirks and compulsions. Part of the joy of having Natalie around for four and a half seasons (and counting) is getting to see Julie grow up and evolve in a way that we never did with Benjy. It also helps that Julie has been played by a single actress from the start, whereas Benjy pingponged between two different actors throughout the course the first two and a half seasons.

The most disgusting thing about the way they wrote out Sharona was the fact that they had her move back in with her ex-husband, whom she closed the door on in "Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect" after he was just using her and Benjy to extract money from his uncle's will. I hope "Mr. Monk and Sharona" addresses this and caps her character on a better note.

And while I'm thilled that Bitty Schram agreed to come back and give Monk and Sharona proper closure, I hope we get to find out the truth behind what happened to Natalie's husband Mitch. His mysterious death gave Monk and Natalie something deep in common that Monk and Sharona couldn't share, and I'm kind of disappointed that this parallel was never explored more deeply.

I was thinking the same thing when the "final season" was announced. Wasn't there an episode where someone told Natalie that there was more to Mitch's death than the official story?