Characters such as The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper or Community‘s Abed Nadir are now a staple on every other sitcom. There’s always that one eccentric and overly obsessive guy. I would like to believe that Adrian Monk serves as the archetype for the TV oddball. Portrayed to perfection by Tony Shalhoub, he serves as the titular character in the comedy-drama series Monk, which dominated the airwaves from 2002 to 2009. The show was not available to watch it India for a long time… but that’s changed now. All eight seasons of the Emmy award-winning show are now available on Netflix. A movie titled Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie was released in 2023 and is available on JioCinema.

For those of you who were too young to catch the show back when it aired, the premise of the show is simple: Monk is a highly gifted detective who solves cases by noticing things that nobody else can. He also suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and a number of phobias (germs being at the top). Each episode works like a typical offering of House MD or Sherlock—where an incredibly gifted individual manages to rise above the conflict in the usual 40-50 minute runtime. But at no point does Monk feel boring or stale. You’re always waiting to see what he picks up on and finally says the words, “I just solved the case.”

That’s largely due to Shalhoub and his costars’ great performances as well as the stellar writing. Unlike a lot of shows from the 2000s that have failed to stand the test of time, Monk remains relevant thanks to its sympathetic portrayal of a troubled but gifted man. None of the jokes are aimed at the many problems—psychological or physical—that bedevil him. The humour is a product of his disbelief at how people function in this dirty (literally and metaphorically) world without a second thought. Everyone around him is compassionate for the most part, leaving us with a fuzzy feeling at the end of each episode.

The show’s main arc focuses on the death of Monk’s wife Trudy: the only case he has failed to solve and the root of many of his problems. These are the moments that humanise him, giving the viewers an opportunity to empathise with this brilliant, idiosyncratic individual. The show’s finale focuses on this very case. But the 120-odd episodes that lead up to this denouement are equally entertaining.