Monk still holds up in 2020

GQ

Tony Shalhoub's influential 2002-2009 USA series about a former San Francisco police homicide detective with OCD is a world apart from Golden Age of TV dramas airing at the same time like The Wire and The Sopranos. "Watching Monk is like slipping my brain into my softest pair of sweatpants for 45 minutes at a time, or impulse-buying a roll of Werther’s Originals in the drugstore checkout line," says Gabrielle Paiella. "The crimes are gripping enough that the viewer is invested in seeing them solved, but rarely gruesome; any outward zaniness often gives way to sweetness and sadness. Best of all, there is no current Monk discourse in 2020, aside from me regularly saying, 'so, I’ve been watching Monk' to a bunch of people who don’t watch Monk."