REVIEW: Mr. Monk and a new friend take a short, touching break from theme-heavy episodes

Sweet and beneficial for its central character's emotional needs, "Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door" is a well-crafted, appropriately silly story about Tony Shalhoub's Adrian Monk making an old friend that might actually like him.

Apropos about the episode is that it exploits the fact that Monk never had a normal mother in order to allow the detective to get close to Marge Johnson (Gena Rowlands), a friendly old lady he meets at a sidewalk, and that a lot of people who have tried to befriend him outside of the main cast of characters had an agenda behind their friendliness.

Marge as a character could only work if she had lost a significant other, to which Monk could relate because of Trudy, and a son, the place of which he could take. Otherwise, Monk and Marge becoming close could have been mistaken for something more inappropriately intimate with her hanging out at his apartment and cooking him meals.

Their relationship allows Monk to take pride in his work, stop compulsively obsessing about things being evenly spaced, albeit temporarily, and hopefully not be so mistrustful of people in the future.

That Marge needs Monk as much as he needs her removes viewers' doubt that their friendship is not genuine. Then, the writers wisely play with this established story element to raise their suspicions once Marge is involved when the neighbor she complains a lot about commits a crime.

All the setup makes for progressively heartbreaking scenes in a pawn shop and then in a police interrogation room when Monk slowly but surely turns on her.

Particularly novel is how one of Monk's at times far-fetched theories about the motives of homicides is completely wrong this this time around and not in line with his oftentimes distrustful nature.

Most humorous about the episode is the sinister curator (Marc Vann) of the Guinness World Records museum, Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) having fun with the professional egg eater, Jason Gray-Stanford's Randy Disher's Terminator-like homicide motive, which he is later lead to think could be possible.

But what is possible, and too convenient, is how the garage door at the house of John Keyes (Marcus Giamatti) is open toward the episode's end so that Monk and Stottlemeyer can walk in without waiting to get a warrant to enter the premises to solve the murder case, the frivolousness of which is made up for by not being the central crime in the episode.

"Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door" finds a proper balance, telling a story driven by the sweet mother-son interaction between its two central characters while at the same time retaining the carnival appeal of past theme episodes that have become a series hallmark.

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