The marvellous misery of Monk: why we still love Tony Shalhoub’s downbeat dramedy

Partly because I’m a dad now and partly because most nights I’m too tired to see straight, over the last year I’ve started to prefer lighter TV viewing. In that context it seems odd that I’d be drawn to a show with an overall body count higher than The Sopranos but I’ve inhaled all eight seasons of Monk, the hit crime dramedy that ran from 2002 to 2009.

Most people know the premise even if they’ve never seen the show. Tony Shalhoub is Adrian Monk, a brilliant private investigator with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that both allows him to solve seemingly impossible crimes and renders him unable to perform basic tasks. From The Mentalist to Columbo and all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, the unconventional-yet-brilliant sleuth has been a favourite of crime drama for longer than TV has existed; Shalhoub himself doubted whether he could do good work in yet another cop show.

The real beauty of Monk comes from its defining creative decision: let Monk be miserable. Too often the main character in this type of show is too good to be true – finding everything effortless, from solving the case to seducing various love interests. Or they might be a cookie-cutter tortured genius, with a bolted-on character flaw to add tension. (He drinks too much! He can’t stop cheating on his wife!) This is emphatically not the case for Monk, who is maybe the most unshakably downcast main character to grace primetime.

Monk can also be kind of a dick. He’s part hall monitor, part Scrooge McDuck; he clicks at his assistants when he wants a wet wipe and is constantly trying to dock their pay. He leaves single pennies as tips and files reimbursement forms with the San Francisco PD. He has murderous running feuds with his therapist’s other patients over who needs more therapy.

He’s wildly prudish – in one episode, he’s taken off a case because it involves a nudist, a class of person he believes should be shot on sight. “They were having a sex-affair,” he says solemnly whenever revealing that two people were in a physical relationship. “They were sex-lovers.” Cornering a marijuana farmer, he accusingly lists all his imagined street terms for weed – “The devil’s parsley! Skunk! Splim! Splam! Mooster! Side salad!” – before mistakenly believing he’s accidentally inhaled some “mooster” and handcuffing himself to a tractor for safety’s sake.

Most of all, Monk is an incurable pessimist, and not just because he can’t solve his wife’s murder. “I’m not suicidal, I just wish I was never born. There’s a difference!” he insists. Asked how it feels to be right all the time, he answers: “Terrible.” Told that he’s going to hell, he shoots back instantly: “I am in hell.”

The portrayal of OCD in Monk is far from perfect – it’s often played for laughs and contains plenty of retrograde stereotypes and inaccuracies about the reality of life for people with the disorder and about mental illness more broadly. Both during and after the show’s original run, people with OCD have described their complicated feelings about a show that both helped to demystify the condition and reinforced dangerous and offensive misconceptions about it.

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But, helped by Shalhoub’s peerless acting, Monk does capture the exhaustion, shame and despair that people with mental illness often experience – that hateful feeling that, no matter how much therapy you go to or how diligently you take your meds, you’re never going to get better and that it’s your fault. “I don’t want to be an extraordinary man,” Monk tells his therapist in one episode. “I want to be the guy on the bus, coming home at five o’clock, helping his kids with their homework. I’m just so tired. I’m so tired of being me.”

While the show derives much of its emotional heft from Monk’s struggle with his tics and phobias, it doesn’t fall into pandering schmaltz like The Good Doctor, a show that is now a byword for ludicrously offensive portrayals of autistic people. In Adrian Monk, Shalhoub created a character who made it OK to be miserable. When some well-meaning friend tells him that “There’s always hope!” he responds, deadpan: “There’s never hope.” And somehow, it makes the world a little brighter.

• Monk is streaming on Netflix, Binge and 7plus in Australia, Netflix in the UK and Peacock in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here