Monk Season Finale is tomorrow. If you don't watch Monk you are missing one of the very finest extended comedic performances seen in a long time, courtesy of Tony Shaloub.
You can think of Monk as a modern day Columbo with a better sense of humor. Ostensibly a police procedural, the "mysteries" range from clever to cheesy and there is no violence to speak of. The charm is in the interplay of the characters with Adrian Monk, an extremely obsessive compulsive Sherlock Holmes. That premise may make Monk seem like a one-trick pony — using the gimmick of Monk's unrelenting fastidiousness and limitless compulsion for order to generate gags and punch lines. It is to a point, but there's enough leftover personality to care about and Shaloub plays it without any sort of bombast and with utter conviction.
It will run thin eventually, but not yet. Episodes should rerun all summer; catch 'em if you haven't yet.
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The Sopranos begins a new season on Sunday and I have mixed feelings about it. They can certainly do good previews - the one running on HBO is more riveting than most of last season's episodes were. The past three seasons have been uneven with occasional flashes of the brilliance of the first. The movers and shakers behind the series maintain that the topic always was and will be Family, as opposed to Mobhood. That's a good sentiment, but they haven't really meshed the two very well since season one. We know Tony's family is falling apart; he's a scummy husband and a misguided father, whose self-delusion shields him from changing. Those facts really do not depend on Tony being the mob boss to be valid. The relationship between the two is tenuously held through circumstance. Tony's mob connections just happen to play into the family problems, they are not as deeply interwoven as they were in the first season.
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