A few years ago, I wrote for GQ about my journey of becoming a Monk superfan. I had previously believed that the show, which stars Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk—a former San Francisco homicide detective whose obsessive-compulsive disorder both tormented him and made him a savant at crime-solving—was for grandparents. And I wasn’t exactly wrong. It is, compared to most detective shows, fairly lighthearted (also, compared to most detective shows, just literally well-lit.) But guess what? This is Grandpa Quarterly now (until the end of this blog post).
Monk originally aired from 2002 to 2009 on USA. The timing of my article, titled “I Love Monk?” February 2020. Yes: my admittance came 11 years after Monk went off the air and exactly one month before we were plunged into a global pandemic and trapped at home binge-watching television. But, on the other side of the pandemic, we’ve emerged with something incredibly fitting: a Monk movie, titled Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie.
The logline goes: “Monk returns to solve one last, very personal case involving his beloved stepdaughter Molly, a journalist preparing for her wedding.” And, per the new trailer for Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie it looks as if much of the original cast has returned—Ted Levine as Stottlemeyer, Jason Gray-Stanford as Randy, Traylor Howard as Natalie, Melora Hardin as Trudy, Hector Elizondo as Monk’s therapist. (The Frasier reboot, out last month, did not fare quite as well in this department.)
The thrust seems to be that, in a post-Covid world, everybody is like Monk now, obsessively hand sanitizing away. Watch the trailer here, before the movie premieres on Peacock on December 8th:
But only Monk brought his own personalized hand sanitizer stand.
I repeat: he brought his own personalized hand sanitizer stand.
