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Monk, USA, Fridays 9pm
IMDb; TV.com; USA; Wikipedia

Now this show is really good. It stars the always enjoyable Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk, a former police detective who got kicked out of the San Francisco PD a few years ago, and now does private consulting work. He's really brilliant, very Sherlock Holmes-y, except that he is obsessive-compulsive, germ-phobic, and stuff like that. It got worse after his wife, Trudy, was murdered, a case which is still unsolved. (We hear alot about Trudy, but we rarely see Monk working on solving that case. It is, however, the show's over-arching mystery, and the reason I have moved the entry for this show from "quirky" to the "mysterious" category.) He has an assistant, Sharona Fleming (who we like), who um... well, she's like a personal nurse or whatever. Helps him out with all the normal little things in life that he's not really equipped to take care of himself. She enjoys being involved with the cases, but she also gets very frustrated and annoyed with Monk sometimes. And she has a son named Benjy who she raises by herself. In the middle of the third season, Sharona left the show. We learn that she remarried her ex-husband and moved to New Jersey (a convenient excuse which I never found believable, for the actress leaving the show). So, Monk gets a new assistant, Natalie Teeger (who we like). She has a daughter named Julie. Her husband was a Navy pilot who died a few years ago. Natalie also helps with cases, and helps Monk with little things, but she's not a nurse, and doesn't coddle him as much as Sharona (despite her frequent complaints about it) always did.

Monk also sees a psychiatrist named Dr. Charles Kroger, and wants to get back on the force, but... he really isn't in any condition for that. He does have a friend in the department, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, with whom Monk often ends up working on police cases. There also is a somewhat bumbling police detective, Lt. Randall Disher, who works under Stottlemeyer. What else to say about the show? I said it's really good. Well written, well acted, very interesting, great stories, nice subtle humor, good characters, the theme music fits quite nicely.... The theme music changed after the first season, this time to a song by Randy Newman. Both themes work well. And, yeah, that's about all I can think to say.

The Pretender, NBC
Fox DVD; IMDb; TV.com; Wikipedia

There is an organization known as the Centre. They do all kinds of strange and horrible things there, you'll never know about all of it. One thing is they had stolen and raised some kids who are Pretenders, which means they can quickly study up on any subject, put themselves into any situation, and become anyone. Do any kind of job. Figure things out. They're brilliant, and the Centre was using their genius for evil purposes. One of those Pretenders, Jarod, escaped, when he was grown up. Each week he'd assume a new identity, a new job, and help people out, or bring people to justice for their misdeeds. He was also constantly trying to find his parents, who he hadn't seen for many years, since he was stolen from them. And, he's constantly learning about life in the outside world, and trying to figure out how he fits into it. And we occasionally see flashbacks to when he was a kid at the Centre, as well as video recordings of some of his time there, on small discs called DSAs (digital simulation archives). Generally the stuff Jarod watched on the DSAs he stole when he escaped the Centre would relate somehow to what was going on in his life now.

Meanwhile, a team from the Centre were trying to find and recapture him. They included Miss Parker (who we quite like), who was the daughter of Mr. Parker, one of the people who ran the Centre; and Sydney, a psychologist or something, who had raised Jarod at the Centre and thought of him as a son; and Broots, who basically did research and computer stuff. Meanwhile, there are a great many mysteries surrounding the Centre; one of them concerns the death many years ago of Miss Parker's mother, about which Jarod tries to help Miss Parker find the truth. Of course there are all kinds of other people at the Centre, evil people like Mr. Raines, Mr. Lyle, the Triumvirate, etc. It's all unbelievably complicated.

There have been a couple TV movies on TNT: The Pretender 2001 (IMDb; Movie Tome; TNT) and Island of the Haunted (IMDb; Movie Tome; TNT) and may be more eventually... But I don't think we'll ever find out about everything. Surely not everything will ever be answered.