History Monk / TropesAToE

** In the novel ''Mr. Monk Is Open for Business'', there's a reference that makes it clear that ''Series/BreakingBad'' exists in the ''Monk'' universe, when Natalie compares hers and Monk's client Henry Pickler to Walter White. Several of the guest stars in various episodes of ''Monk'' also happened to appear in ''Breaking Bad'': for example, a Marin County police detective in the episode "Mr. Monk and the Bad Girlfriend" is played by Christopher Cousins (Hendrix; Ted Beneke), the episode "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail" featured Danny Trejo (Spyder Rudner; Tortuga), the episode "Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike" had a murder victim played by Michael Shamus Wiles (Jimmy Cusack; ASAC George Merkert), "Mr. Monk and the Big Reward" guest-starred DJ Qualls (Rufus; Detective Getz), "Mr. Monk Goes Camping" guest-starred Maurice Compte (Del Johnston; cartel buttonman Gaff), and others.

** The scene in "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine" where Monk bluffs Lester Highsmith with a water pistol would never work in real life. The water pistol Monk is using is painted jet black, possibly with a brown handle. Because of child-safety laws, all toy guns have to be brightly colored or have a bright orange cap on the tip of the barrel so children will be safe when holding one and tell the difference between a toy gun and a real gun. This particular water pistol is missing both of these features.

* DramaticIrony: After years of working as Monk's assistant, in ''Mr. Monk Helps Himself'', Natalie becomes ''his'' boss after she got her PI license since Monk couldn’t be in the business without her. Something Stottlemeyer regularly teases him about.

** In "[[Recap/MonkS7E2MrMonkAndTheGenius Mr. Monk and the Genius]]", Patrick Kloster poisons his wife with a "poison pawn" - a trap that is impossible for the victim to resist. In this case, this involves him discovering her secret stash of liquor, poisoning that, then counting on her to hide the bottle herself so he wouldn't have to.

* TwentyPercentMoreAwesome: "Mr. Monk and the Big Game" uses the standard "give 110%" cliche, although Monk (volunteering as a basketball coach) tries to settle with 100% as he claims that 110% is mathematically impossible. He eventually decides that it is acceptable for one player to give 110%, as long as a teammate drops to 90% to compensate.
* ABNegative: The season-two finale featured a victim whose blood group was "AB-negative with a D- antigen--the rarest blood-type in the world!" It is indeed rare; in fact, [[ArtisticLicenseBiology it doesn't exist]].[[note]]Although it is possible for certain blood subtypes to show up this way on a test, the one doing the testing should have recognized an impossible result and retested.[[/note]] This turned out to be why he was murdered -- he was a death row inmate about to be executed, whose kidney was to be transplanted into a billionaire who shared his blood type. The prison librarian held a grudge against the billionaire, who was suing her son, so she paid an inmate to poison the condemned man's last meal in order to render his kidneys useless.
* AbnormalAmmo: In "[[Recap/MonkS2E12MrMonkAndTheTVStar Mr. Monk and the TV Star]]", there is a ''Series/{{CSI}}'' parody called ''Crime Lab: SF''. When Monk, Sharona, Stottlemeyer, and Disher walk into the dubbing studio to arrest star/executive producer Brad Terry for murder, he's in the middle of doing dubbing work for an episode in which a corrupt senator apparently shoots and kills a hooker and covers his tracks with bullets made of frozen blood.

* DrinkingOnDuty

* DentistEpisode: In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Dentist", Lieutenant Disher witnesses a murder while he's going under for oral surgery. To investigate, Monk has to go undercover as a patient and face one of his greatest fears: dentists.

* BeAsUnhelpfulAsPossible: The Living Statue performer in "Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank" demonstrates that apparently, by dressing up in tin and freezing in poses, you are automatically given permission to disregard police officers requesting important information from you.

** In "Mr. Monk and the Man Who Shot Santa", Monk mentions that this trope was partially the reason why all of his Christmases were the worst barring those spent with Trudy, as in 1964, he received only one walkie-talkie from his father, to which his father knew was useless, but gave it to him anyway because [[KickTheDog Monk doesn't have any friends to play with anyway.]] Ironically, that memory is also what leads to Monk solving the case about what the Santa was doing the day he was forced to shoot him in self defense.
** In "Mr. Monk Meets His Dad", a large part of Ben Glazer's plot deals with this trope: all the items in Jack Monk, Sr.'s truck that he is supposed to deliver to orphanages are filled with rubbish junk, even causing one girl to state angrily that she hates Christmas, Santa, and the elves for that. Adrian is suspicious when he finds there are only six packages in the truck, a very tiny load for an 18 wheeler with a large trailer, and furthermore, they are forced into taking out-of-the-way routes instead of direct roads. Turns out the entire delivery route was a wild goose chase so the truck could keep it under 5,000 miles (as the GPS device resets itself ever 5,000 miles) to erase evidence of the fact that Glazer took this rig unit when he killed his partner Kenneth Woods.

* CrazyEnoughToWork: "It's a gift...and a curse." In "Mr. Monk and the Red Herring", Monk goes to a museum and sees the body of a caveman that supposedly froze to death. Monk determines that he was actually murdered and actually figured out what happened. We never actually get to hear it, but suffice it to say Monk is a really good detective to solve a 30,000-year-old murder.

* CrimeAfterCrime: In a number of episodes, the murders are relatively innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The mystery is finding out why they were murdered in the first place, and it often comes down to the murder being used to cover up some other crime, possibly another murder, which is only discovered through the murder investigation. If that's not the case, someone else is likely to be murdered in an attempt to cover up evidence from the first murder.
** A typical use of this, for example, occurs in "Mr. Monk and the Very Very Old Man," in which the town of Malden's deputy mayor Dennis Gammill, accidentally kills an innocent teenager named Darren Leveroni in a drunken hit and run years before the plot happened. He felt guilty, so he writes a confession and puts it in a time capsule buried on the 110th birthday of Miles Holling, the oldest man in the world, just a week after the hit-and-run. But in order to keep his confession from being dug up, Gammill has to, five years later, be sure that Miles doesn't live to see his 115th birthday. To do so, he kills a guard at the nursing center, George Rowe, and uses his uniform and security card to get into the place and kill Miles. Gammill goes down for triple homicide in an attempt to cover up his single hit and run.

** "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing": Peter Breen, a construction foreman, bribes one of his workers, Eddie Murdoch, to kill his girlfriend Stefanie Preston. Breen gives Murdoch a house key to get into Stefanie's house. Murdoch kills Stefanie by strangling her, throws her body on a couch, spills alcohol to make it look like she had been drinking, then sets her house on fire by lighting a pile of old newspapers with a cigarette. However, as he is walking away from the house after setting the fire, Murdoch realizes he's lost the keys Breen gave him, but the moment he realizes it happens to be the moment that the fire engine from Fire Company 53 is driving right past him on its way to Stefanie's house. Murdoch knows he needs to get Breen's keys back, so he goes to Fire Company 53, the closest firehouse, intending to steal some firefighting gear so he can recover the keys without being noticed. It also turns out that Monk and an ex-firefighter named Rusty are in the firehouse when Murdoch walks in. So as Murdoch is starting to grab a coat and helmet, Rusty appears and confronts him. Murdoch promptly grabs a shovel and strikes Rusty a killing blow to the head. Monk hears the noise, runs over to investigate, and after a struggle with Murdoch, grabs the shovel. But just as he's about to swing the shovel, Murdoch grabs a container of cleaning solution off the workbench and throws it into Monk's face, blinding him. While Monk is incapacitated, Murdoch grabs his gear and makes it back to Stefanie's burning house. Once there, he slips on the gear, and manages to walk right through the police line, into the house, and grab the keys. So he goes for double murder, arson, assault and battery, and impersonating a firefighter for what should have just been a single murder and arson.

** "Mr. Monk is the Best Man": Stephanie Briggs, T.K.'s friend, shoots and kills herformer ecoterrorist colleague Martin Kettering and sets his body on fire. But while driving away, she is pulled over for speeding, before she has a chance to get rid of the gun she used. Stephanie hastily hides it in a tuxedo bag she is intending to give to Leland. It also happens to be her third speeding offense, so she is arrested, the car is impounded, and Leland grabs the tuxedo bag. Stephanie hence does whatever she can do to try to keep Leland from opening the tuxedo bag and discovering the gun she used on Kettering: first, she ransacks his place while trying to find the gun. When that doesn't work, she threatens T.K. while using an electronic voice scrambler, then firebombs Stottlemeyer's car, and lastly sets off a bomb at the church during the wedding rehearsal. Monk figures that Stephanie is behind these incidents when he realizes that the night she was arrested was the night Kettering was killed, and she was pulled over not too far from where the body was found, plus the fact that the incidents all happened after Stephanie was released from jail for the speeding offense.

* CrookedContractor: "Honest" Jake Phillips in "Mr. Monk Buys a House" is one. [[spoiler:To elaborate: Monk runs into him in a hardware store while buying fixtures for a new house he has purchased on a whim, then Monk calls Jake over when he finds an off-centered lamp. Jake comes to take a look at it. The problems he finds and the work necessary to fix them eventually cause his work to deteriorate into house-wide demoliton project so extensive that Monk and Natalie are left cowering on the steps as Jake and his assistant "Honest" Ramone work. Then Jake is revealed to be after a hidden fortune left behind by the last tenant of the house. His accomplice and lover killed that occupant to prevent him from telling the secret to anyone else, though she told Jake about it. Jake stabs and kills her in her house after he sees Monk find evidence linking her to the first crime. When Monk and Natalie find the bloodstained murder weapon on Jake's toolbelt, he takes them hostage by shackling them by their legs to a claw-footed bathtub. After finding the money, he shoots and kills Ramone, before Monk and Natalie knock him out by pushing a wall down on him. They manage to crawl down the hall to send up Morse code smoke signals from the fireplace to Stottlemeyer and Disher, who barely arrive in the nick of time as Jake recovers and prepares to shoot his hostages.]]

** A great example is the novel ''Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse''. Monk suspects Lucas Breen, rich CEO of a development company, and who also sits on the police commission, of killing an old woman and setting her house on fire, then walking to a nearby firehouse, killing a Dalmatian there, and stealing a coat and helmet. Even though Stottlemeyer and Disher are convinced by Monk of Breen's guilt, they are unable to capture Breen because of a lack of solid evidence, and because Stottlemeyer gets orders from his superiors to quit harassing Breen. Secretly, he does order some tests on firefighting gear from the firehouse Breen visited to get the equipment. After they accuse him of the death of a homeless man, Stottlemeyer risks being demoted. Monk only connects Breen to the killings because Monk and Breen are both allergic to cats - which the fire victim kept a large litter of, and the overcoat Breen wore collected a lot of cat dander.

* DesignatedDriver: Inverted in "Mr. Monk is the Best Man". Because Stottlemeyer let Monk plan his bachelor party, Monk supplies what amounts to 144 oz. of beer (12 partygoers times 12 twelve-ounce bottles of beer), which Stottlemeyer notes means that they either have enough to make each party member become slightly sleepy (and certainly not enough to require a designated driver), or give it all to one of the partygoers to make him extremely polluted and make him the "designated drunk". The majority choose the latter option, with Randy volunteering to become the designated drunk. As a result, there's an incident when Randy stumbles in, totally plastered, asking about who owns the police car out front that's painted a charcoal gray with flames on the side, and on the roof and windshield.

** Played with in "Mr. Monk Goes to a Fashion Show", where fashion designer Julian Hodge killed his model Clea Vance, and later kills her roommate Natasia Zorelle when Monk becomes suspicious. He got away with the first murder due to Howard "Gordo" Gordon, the forensics investigator, soliciting a bribe from Hodge to set up a sometimes delivery boy as a fall guy.
** In ''Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants'', we meet Ian Ludlow, a mystery writer who also consults for the Los Angeles Police Department. Only Monk reveals that to meet his 90 day new-release deadlines, Ludlow has a distinct method: he befriends someone at a book signing. He then learns all about them and the people in their life. Then he kills them. After that, he inserts himself into the investigation of said death and manipulates both sides of the case, then frames the most unlikely individual for the murder. For example, he goes to San Francisco, steals a Jaws of Life rescue cutter from a firehouse, glues a set of alligator jaws onto it, then mauls a shoe salesman and frames Natalie for the crime.

** Cpl. Alice Westergren in "Mr. Monk and the Secret Santa" is an honest cop, until her lover, Det. Terry Chasen, decides to break off their affair and return to his wife. She gets furious and kills him with a poisoned bottle of wine, and manipulates things to make it seem like the bottle was meant for Stottlemeyer and Terry drank it by mistake: first, she invents a SecretSanta gift exchange at the department's Christmas party, then rigs the draw so that Stottlemeyer is the last one to choose a name and gets Terry's name. She brings a bottle of poisoned port into the station addressed to Stottlemeyer, knowing he doesn't drink port. Then, at some point during the party, Alice breaks into Stottlemeyer's office and steals the hair trimmer he purchased for Terry. When Stottlemeyer can't find his gift, Alice suggests he hand Terry the poisoned bottle of port, and the stage is set.

** In "Mr. Monk and the Leper," Mandy Bronson utilizes Monk in this way through a hired accomplice impersonating her husband Derek. Monk realizes he's been duped when he realizes that Derek could not have known his house security code if the security system was installed after he supposedly "vanished". He also tells Natalie that he made a perfect patsy for Mandy: she'd researched his OCD compulsions and fears, and she and the hired accomplice were both aware that Monk would be afraid to touch a leper's hand (meaning he'd not have a good enough look to determine that "Derek Bronson" was just an imposter), and reinforced it by having the meetings always happen in poor lighting conditions.

-->'''Annie:''' Well I guess he's with Kurt, Jimi and Janis now.[[note]]Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin were three renowned singers who died from drug overdoses at the age of 27 (making them members of the 27 Club).[[/note]]

* DitzySecretary: This becomes a plot point in the episode "Mr. Monk Fights City Hall." Eileen Hill, a councilwoman who Monk hopes will help him save the parking garage where Trudy's car exploded hires a secretary who is not incredibly capable or bright, either as a secretary or as her proxy in the vote. Monk eventually figures out that the councilwoman hoped to get her boyfriend to leave his wife by faking a pregnancy and therefore advertised for a secretary in Lamaze classes so she could get pregnant urine under the guise of a blood test. Unfortunately, Monk insults the secretary while giving the summation, and it costs him the vote.

* TheDogWasTheMastermind: In "Mr. Monk Makes the Playoffs", it is revealed that Monk met BobCostas after helping him out with a matter of a cat salesman who sold demented cats. In particular, Monk proved that Costas's cat planned to kill him with a squeeze toy.

** In "Mr. Monk Gets Drunk", Monk accidentally got drunk and was able to subdue a hitman, and solve a conspiracy involving everyone in a hotel covering up a man's death so they can keep his money.

* EmbarrassingSlide: During "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion", while Stottlemeyer is making a request for information on a homicide to attendees at Monk's UC Berkeley reunion, suddenly the slideshow, which has been running this whole time, displays some very embarrassing pictures of him in riot gear violently attacking protesters at an anti-nuclear demonstration in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Monk and Natalie are mortified, while Stottlemeyer makes a very bad attempt to defend his actions in the photos.

** In "Mr. Monk goes to the Asylum", he manages to escape a straight-jacket and a padded cell.
** In "Mr. Monk is on the Run", Monk escapes a pair of handcuffs and runs into the woods.
** In "Mr. Monk and the End", Monk, poisoned, escapes his hospital room, to take vengeance on Trudy's murderer.

** His assistant whose background is in medicine instead of law enforcement, but whom none-the-less proves invaluable in solving crime. Here, Sharona is more equivalent to Dr. Watson with a medical background, in contrast to Natalie's background as the widow of a deceased military pilot.
** A [[InspectorLestrade smug police officer]] who makes the actual arrest, often being quick to bring the obvious suspect into the interrogation room. (After the first season Stottlemeyer begins to move away from this, generally trusting Monk's intuition, and showing genuine detective skills.)

* ExpositionAlreadyCovered: In Season 2 "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail", Monk's assistant Sharona discovers the solution to the mystery independently of Monk, and the climax had her tell it to the other characters as they were searching for him. Once they rescued Monk, he begins to explain the mystery when Sharona interrupts him, making him mildly annoyed.

* BachelorAuction: In "Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan", Monk, Stottlemeyer and Disher participate in one. Randy gets a woman whose nine year old son apparently wants to be a cop, but turns out to have reconsidered later on (the standard "hates cops" excuse). Stottlemeyer ends up with his girlfriend Linda Fusco, which turns out to be opportune for both of them because their previous dates had always been canceled by Stottlemeyer's work getting in the way. Monk, not liking this event, gives money to Natalie so that she can "buy" him and free him from going on a date. But this fails when Marci Maven walks in and outbids Natalie by a large margin.

* CharacterAgedWithTheActor: Julie Teeger is supposed to be about the same age as her actress Emmy Clarke, give or take a few years. She ages accordingly, which is why in her first episodes, she looks like an 11 year old, and in her season 7 and season 8 episodes, she looks like an 18 year old woman. It may be slight DawsonCasting, though: Emmy Clarke was born in 1991, but when "Mr. Monk and the Red Herring" aired in 2005, Julie was 11.

* CrazyEnoughToWork: "It's a gift...and a curse." In "Mr. Monk and the Red Herring", Monk goes to a museum and sees the body of a caveman that supposedly froze to death. Monk determines that he was actually murdered and actually figured out what happened. We never actually get to hear it, but suffice it to say Monk is a really good detective to solve a 30,000 year old murder.