Having been put on administrative leave following his nervous breakdown after the unsolved murder of his wife, Trudy, brilliant homicide detective Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) returns to work as Monk begins its first season. Unfortunately, during his three years away from the San Francisco Police Department, Monk has morphed into the obsessive-compulsive to end all obsessive-compulsives, with a mortal fear of everything from cows milk to unshined shoes. However, Monks affliction has sharpened his photographic memory and attention to the most infinitesimal of details, thus his many eccentricities are tolerated by his old friend SFPD captain Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) and his deputy Lt. Randall Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford). Still, the department balks at fully reinstating Monk until he is cured (as if!), so our hyper-phobic hero works in a freelance capacity. Acting as Monks assistant is his loyal nurse, Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram). Monks first case has him diligently determining a link between two apparently unconnected crimes, the murder of a young woman and the attempted assassination of a mayoral candidate. In subsequent episodes, Monk pulls the rug out from under a phony psychic detective; attempts to ascertain if an 800-pound man was capable of committing a murder that would have required a very slim assailant; tries to figure out how a man could be stabbed atop a ferris wheel without any witnesses; looks into the mystery of the billionaire mugger; struggles to clear a murder suspect who bears a startling resemblance to his late wife; hunts for clues at the cleanest crime scene in crime history; agonizingly endures a cross-country flight to solve a killing and unmask an impostor; and, during a brief rest stop at a mental institution, follows a trail of murder patients to the likely perpetrator -- and this while spending most of his time in a straitjacket! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide