Doing what one does naturally in 2020—that is, washing one’s hands, bingeing, and overthinking the dystopian parallels between fiction and reality—sent me reflecting on the fictional life of Adrian Monk. When not solving homicides, the world-famous private detective Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) of the USA series Monk spent most of his time alone, usually cleaning. In general, he avoided hugs, handshakes or other contact-based social niceties. When he was called onto a case, he required an orderly, quiet crime scene with ample personal space—which he hardly ever got—before he could begin to think. Perhaps Monk would have been more comfortable than all of us with the new rules of social distancing that we have spent months living with during the current global pandemic. Or perhaps, it would have pained him to see everyone become as cautious, distant, and distracted as he. The more I sanitized, kept my distance from other people, and confined myself to my home, considering more and more the microbial dangers of the COVID-19 era, the more compassionately I recalled this afraid, lonely, burdened character, whom I’d felt I’d started to resemble. As cases came and went, Monk spent much of his time trying to overcome his phobia of physical touch, hoping to be able to forge meaningful, socially-typical relationships. In this sense, Monk came to be less a show about solving puzzles and more about the painful toll of severe social isolation.
If you remember anything about Adrian Monk, it will be for one of three things: one, he is a Sherlock Holmes-level genius, who can solve any crime; two, he has an extreme case of obsessive compulsive disorder and germaphobia that manifests in a number of particularities; three, his wife Trudy (Melora Hardin) was killed by a car bomb, which forever scarred him and uprooted his life. After Trudy died, Monk was so devastated that he suffered a psychotic break and was subsequently discharged as homicide detective from the San Francisco Police Department. He did not leave his house for three years. When the show opens, Adrian has just managed to go back to work as a consultant for the SFPD with the help of his tough-love-slinging assistant, the nurse Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram). Alongside Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), Lieutenant Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford), and with the constant assistance of his sidekick Sharona, and her later, more patient replacement, Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), Monk helped solve the thornier homicides that baffled other officers. In collaborating with his old department Monk hoped to rebuild a credible reputation that would get him reinstated. Reinstatement, however, also required that he receive a sign-off from his therapist, Dr. Charles Kroger (Stanley Kamel), later replaced by Dr. Neven Bell (Héctor Elizondo), with whom he met at least twice a week to discuss one or other of the 312 phobias complicating his life.
Monk ran on cable television for eight seasons from 2002 to 2007, and until 2012, held the record for the most watched scripted drama episode—9.4 million viewers—in cable television history. The show became known for its air-tight, eccentric murder plots that only someone with Monk’s OCD-heightened insight could have observed as flawed. Here’s an example: Mr. Monk suspects an astronaut of murdering his ex-girlfriend and making it look like a suicide, even though the astronaut flaunts an iron-clad alibi for the time of her death: he was in outer space. How did he do it? Monk figures out that the astronaut hid a remote control in a doll and mailed it to the woman; he drugged her enough to knock her out for a couple of days, then built a contraption that would hang her by command of the remote control once it arrived on her doorstep. (Yikes.) He left for space and let his plan unfold. Two seemingly contradictory facts were true at the outset: the woman was hanged, and during the time that she was hanged, the astronaut was in space. Thankfully, Monk is the best at solving the most impossible-seeming of crimes.
Monk came to be less a show about solving puzzles and more about the painful toll of severe social isolation.Monk was a generic hybrid—part standardized detective procedural, and part comedy series. By utilizing mystery tropes like locked room murders alongside family-friendly plots, Monk led a renaissance of off-beat prime-time dramedy mystery shows which included the USA Network’s Psych and ABC’s Castle. However, in its formality and crime-solving methods, Monk actually more closely resembled Columbo, featuring homicide detective Columbo (Peter Falk), the iconic series that originally aired in 1971. Monk’s plots incorporated “whodunits,” the traditional crime arc that began with the crime and culminated in the discovery of the murderer, as well as “howcatchems,” the inverted crime arc popularized by Columbo, whereby the murderer was known to the audience from the start and the plot revolved around exposing them. Even with its nods to Columbo, Monk squarely earned its place in the detective genre with the memorable, triple Emmy-winning performance of Tony Shalhoub, who gave Adrian Monk a nuanced psychology—possessing brilliant observational and reasoning skills that made him stand out among his peers, alongside tremendous anxieties and non-normative behaviors that made him stand out for their ultimate prevention of his social integration.
The creator of Monk, Andy Breckman, realized that the show’s enduring appeal lay not in the ingenuity of its premise but in its quirky yet compassionate reinterpretation of the ultimate detective, Sherlock Holmes. The eccentric Holmes is already a kind of behavioral nonconformist, disregarding social protocols and not always reading cues. But what if, Monk offered, the greatest detective in the world was sufficiently impacted by grief and OCD, which made him feel even further alienated from society? How would these visible non-normative behaviors affect the way people related to him—and, in turn, the way they perceived his professional work? In this reincarnation, the Holmes character is grieving for his beloved wife and dealing with serious mental health issues that grief has enhanced. Thus, he requires two sets of Dr. Watsons, his sidekicks and his therapists. This Holmes has a subdued sense of personal worth and minimal ego, and his usual cold, calculated rationality is undercut by an openly sensitive heart. In this interpretation, Holmes resembles more of an underdog than a hero. In fact, the show’s repetitive themes and subplots aim not at showcasing Monk’s genius—which is established early on and taken for granted—but at highlighting his personal struggles to connect to other people and his gradual growth into an individual who is able to function in the world around him. As a result, across eight seasons, Monk’s character arc intentionally overshadows the serial mysteries, becoming the most engaging, sympathetic storyline of all.
Both Monk’s genius and OCD set him apart from others to such extraordinary degrees that others can only experience him from afar, through observation. This frequent relationship template introduces a dangerous kind of mental distancing and depersonalization. In “Mr. Monk and the Astronaut,” for example, the astronaut and Monk are not only fighting a moral battle, but campaigning against each other’s masculinity for the acceptance and approval of their peers. With his charisma, connections, and accolades, the astronaut flatters police officers and Natalie, while blatantly excluding Monk from his social gestures; that way he isolates Monk from his usual allies and delegitimizes Monk’s accusations against him. Like a traditional bully harnessing his perceived superiority, the astronaut attacks Monk’s disabilities in order to embarrass and ridicule him; the astronaut claims that Monk’s phobias make him a “lesser man” and a “coward.” Meanwhile, other characters fail to defend Monk—partly because they don’t want to lose their accepted social statuses, and partly because they have never known how to relate to Monk, or even, how to view him as one of them.
Essentially, this astronaut-character voices the unspoken tendency of “normal” people to other Monk—that is, brand him as inferior, alien, or even as their adversary because he cannot conform to social rules and assimilate into society. (This also reminds us of how in our society, disabled individuals are asked to do extra work to participate in or be accepted by society, rather than society’s making itself accessible to more than one proscribed definition of ability.) Ultimately Monk’s personal vindication—like the show’s underlying social criticism—comes in small, pointed doses. At the end of this episode, Monk’s astounding display of courage (stepping in front of the astronaut’s plane as it’s speeding down the runway in a dramatic escape) momentarily breaks down the mental wall between the characters, as they recognize how human (brave, upstanding, and vulnerable) it was of him to risk his life—and how difficult it must have been for him to overcome his own social barriers, in order to do it.
By carrying Monk’s fear of physical touch to the extreme, the show theorizes the phenomenon we now know as “social distancing,” and expresses its accompanying lack of connection, as pain.At the same time, by carrying Monk’s fear of physical touch to the extreme, the show theorizes the phenomenon we now know as “social distancing,” and expresses its accompanying lack of connection, as pain. Having spent childhood without a father, a mostly-absent, depressed mother, and a brother (John Turturro) just as affected by OCD, Monk was a “careful, smart, sad” child; as he belonged to no social group, he became isolated and lonely. After losing Trudy, Monk’s OCD became even more severe. It manifested in compulsions like the need to touch sequential items (such as poles in the street) or rearrange things according to ascending size, and most severely of all, an acute form of germaphobia and a corresponding fear of illness. These latter conditions caused him to avoid shared spaces, stand sufficiently apart from others so that they would not breathe the same air, and reach for a hand wipe every few seconds. (Every week, Natalie buys Monk more than 200 disinfectant wipes.) Any of this behavior starting to sound familiar? A trip to the store for Monk sometimes just means purchasing—or, hoarding—20 bottles of Windex, each of which he disinfects on the conveyor belt. Meanwhile, we, during a pandemic, all have a little Monk in us, buying up all the hand sanitizer and—of all things—toilet paper, continually wiping down surfaces, and standing six feet apart from each other. It is easier now than ever before to relate to Monk. His pain quite literally manifested in obsessive behaviors that would ward off germs—behaviors we all now engage in—which in the process required that he socially distance and therefore deny himself the need for companionship and connection.
The urge to assimilate lay at the heart of Monk’s every interaction with the world at large—no matter how awkward or fraught it may have seemed. Losing Trudy, the only person with whom he’d shared unconditional love and felt a true sense of belonging, dealt an excruciating blow. The aftershocks of his grief severed all his connections to the world—he lost his job, his friends, his desire to laugh and to go outside. He stewed in guilt, self-pity, anger, wrestling with his longing for Trudy just as much as with fears of his own mortality. For twelve years, he dressed in the same bland suit and looked to her case file for a crucial clue, searching for some relief. For twelve years he met with dead ends and confronted the sense of dread that came along with realizing life’s grave uncertainties. Monk often jokes that his talent for solving crime is “a gift . . . and a curse.” The “curse” has nothing to do with crime-solving but nods to his life’s paradox that, while his every instinct tells him to keep away from people, he only wants to join in. But his 312 phobias—ranging from the common fear of heights to the eyebrow-raising fear of milk and oddly specific fear of bees in blenders—represented the vastness of the gulf between him and others, and the difficulties he found in attempting to integrate into social circles, let go of the past, and rebuild his life and confidence. So here was a detective show that cared less about the crime or the semantics of crime-solving—even if it leveraged our curiosity on a weekly basis—and more about the crime-solver and what would become of him in a world whose social rules were the greatest puzzle of all.
Monk’s pervasive language of exclusion and frequent shots of its emotional toll on Adrian—alone, in his apartment, vacuuming—highlight that social bonds can alleviate the traumatizing effects of prevalent death, fear, grief. During the last season of the show, a murderer locks Monk in the trunk of his car along with his nemesis, the equally obsessive but differently-so Harold Crenshaw—which really bugs them. (Their long-standing feud derives from competing for the affections of their therapist.) As their mutual fear of enclosed spaces takes hold, Harold begins to hyperventilate. Monk finds the strength to steady himself, and console Harold. “These walls, they’re not closing in on us,” Monk says, “They’re protecting us, really.” As soon as that realization sinks in, they laugh. It is a rare moment, to see this bickering pair forget their differences and lovingly share common ground. “I’ve been in therapy for ten years,” Monk says, shaking his head at himself. “I think this is the first real breakthrough I’ve ever had. This group therapy thing really works.” Even though it’s not true that overcoming claustrophobia is Monk’s first breakthrough, overcoming this phobia feels sweeter than others because he shares in the success with someone who can understand its heavy toll.
Monk’s real breakthrough in fact is recognizing himself in Harold, acknowledging Harold’s humanity, and meeting someone else’s needs before his own in a very difficult moment. For over a decade, Monk fought with life’s timeline, refusing to simply move on, quickly adapt, or cast a black stone over his shoulder; he’d held steadfastly onto the past because he’d wanted to retain the semblance of normalcy that he knew in his life with Trudy. But striving for the memory of normalcy amid irregular conditions never granted him any lasting relief, just as it won’t for us during an ongoing pandemic. Instead, well before Monk could solve Trudy’s murder, well before his happy ending, he seemed most fulfilled when he bonded with someone else over a mutual overcoming. Radical social and emotional distancing allowed him, in the same way that it can allow us, to recognize how significant moments of shared fear and challenge are. They demand extraordinary presence and vulnerability, both of which create a space conducive to empathy and compassion. While severe social isolation can temporarily injure our sense of belonging, it can also help remind us that ultimately, we are all social beings who can and should deeply depend on each other to feel safe and cared for.
