f13.net

This series just ended on Friday. I skipped most of it but my wife enjoyed it, and since my office is in the living room, I couldn't help but half hear it for all its seasons.

The show long felt like a way overdone SNL skit, like any Mike Meyer's movie once they're releasing the third one. The opening was always 5 minutes of setup, the end was always 5 minutes of wrapup, and the middle was alway Monk being OCD in an ever-growing array of annoying ways. The thing that most bothered me at the end though is similar to other shows with no real ongoing story arc: retconning something into the lore so they could use that to wrap up the series. Mostly this is done because, well, the series is ending for a reason after all, and sometimes that includes the show not having any sort of premise beyond gags.

Ultimately though, I thought the show ended finally showing some amount of character development. It just sucks that it took them until the fourth-to-final episode to even start doing that. Maybe had they advanced the main characters sooner, rather than having per-episode resets, they could have gone in interesting directions.

Additionally, like a lot of recent "character driven" detective shows, this one fell into the trap of having only one character with a brain. Everybody else bumbles around being goofy or charming or mean or slutty or clumsy or whatever two dimensions they happen to have. Watching a team of competent people work is fun (see, for example, CSI), especially if they've also got personalities. Watching a bunch of dummies dick around while they wait for the genius to figure things out (Monk or The Closer) gets dull. House, NCIS, Dexter, and Bones straddle that boundary to varying degrees of success... varying from episode to episode, even.

The long, largely literary tradition of iconic detectives tend to make them lone wolves (Dupin, Wimsey, Columbo) or partners them with a single, clearly secondary assistant (Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, Wolfe and Goodwin). The amusing characters in their stories are perfunctory competition, suspects and victims. The audience isn't meant to get too attached.

Character development helps, sure, witness a number of spectacular British detective series (Prime Suspect, Cracker) but as counterpoint to themes present in the plot, not as the plot entire. If a producer wants to make a soap opera, they'd best make a soap opera.

So you've thought about this then  :oh_i_see:

I would have thought that after all this time they couldn't sustain a multi-year series on purely one-dimensional characters. Sure, there's soaps, but those seem to be dying at one per year these days, probably following the trend of their golden generation of users. But your list of examples makes me realize it works for a number of reasons people more than experienced have figured out how to sell :-)

:awesome_for_real:

Stuff like Monk and The Closer work because people like  soap operas but are ashamed to admit it. Little microcosms of melodramatic twists and gossip can be fun, but they're critically maligned. Here the audience gets to say, "Oh this? It's not a soap opera... it's a detective show." The soaps are dying because the networks know these "character driven" dramas have a wider audience, and because they're devoting daytime TV to the original "reality shows": talk shows! Fewer sets, smaller crews, and less expensive prep time. It's been happening for years.

Battlestar Galactica and 24 are quintessential modern soap operas.

Sometimes. You just do not need an arc. Bite sized goodness is just fine. Especially when you are like me, and catch this show infrequently (its a great show) it allows me to not really worry about what came before, or if this is in order or not. Just sit down, watch, enjoy the funny.

That makes sense. I actually have no problem admitting I don't mind General Hospital, but that's only when my wife is watching it, and I go in knowing I'm only half listening while gaming to a dying art form. Something like Monk seemed to promise more of an arc to it. I wasn't expecting Lost, but neither was I expecting Seinfeld. I don't normally go for TV at all though, so whatever I get is osmosis from whatever she's watching in the same room :-)

Monk was a favorite in our house and we were a bit sad to see it go. I found though that there are only two types of opinions of the show. You either love it, or you hate it. Some people find the character to be hilarious and others believe him to be the most annoying thing since Necrotizing Fasciitis.

I always thought a Monk/Columbo crossover would have been pretty funny. It would be the crime fighing Odd Couple!  :awesome_for_real:

Ok, not really, but I loved Columbo too.

Holy shit did you just compare monk to the closer? REALLY?