Monk Movie Reveals Adrian’s Fate — And Tony Shalhoub and Creator Andy Breckman Answer Our Burning Questions

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the new Peacock film Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie. Proceed at your own risk!

It’s been 14 years since we saw detective Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) solve his late wife Trudy’s (Melora Hardin) murder and meet her long-lost daughter, Molly (Alona Tal), in the 2009 series finale of USA’s Monk. And three years since we watched him stand six feet from his laptop while Zooming with his former colleagues at the start of the pandemic in the short “Mr. Monk Shelters in Place.” They reunite in-person in the new Peacock film Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie for what should be a happy occasion: The wedding of Molly (now played by versatile standout Caitlin McGee) to her investigative journalist love, Griffin (Austin Scott). Only shortly after the arrival of Monk’s former assistant Natalie (Traylor Howard), now a real estate agent in Atlanta, and Randy (Jason Gray-Stanford), still a sheriff in New Jersey and with Bitty Schram’s Sharona (who stayed home to help with her first grandchild), Griffin dies in a bungee-jumping accident.

Monk ultimately gets to say his trademark “here’s what happened”: the Jeff Bezos-type billionaire Rick Eden (James Purefoy) — for whom retired captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) heads security — had Griffin murdered via tampered ruler. The rope Griffin carefully measured, twice, was actually six feet too long. The real shocker of the movie, however, is Monk’s state of mind throughout: He’s suicidal, hoarding pills and planning to reunite with Trudy, whom he’s seeing and talking to again.

We learn the pandemic set back any progress Monk had made on his OCD. He hadn’t left the house for two years. Molly moved in, and he ate meals with her wearing a hazmat suit. He stopped consulting with the San Francisco PD, which had always given him a challenge and purpose. In the opening scene of the film, he’s forced to return the advance for his long overdue memoir, because the publisher (played by Shalhoub’s real-life wife, Brooke Adams) now considers him irrelevant.

Shalhoub admits he never thought the show — a dramedy with the emphasis on the comedy — would ever go to that dark of a place. But he and Monk creator/writer Andy Breckman both agreed there needed to be a real reason to revisit the character, which meant doing something a bit different, digging deeper, and giving fans (and Hector Elizondo’s Dr. Bell) cause to truly worry about Monk. “The way Andy pitched it I felt was so brilliant and subtle: He actually invoked It’s a Wonderful Life,” Shalhoub tells TVLine. “He said, ‘Here’s a traditional, heartwarming Christmas movie, an American classic, which actually starts with a man getting ready to commit suicide. … And it made so much sense, because it is a very beautiful story: It’s heartwarming, and even has elements of comedy within it and quirky characters, and yet, the premise is very, very bleak. That sold me on the whole idea.”

Both Shalhoub and Breckman cite Monk’s scenes with his longtime psychiatrist as some of their favorites in the movie. We learn that Dr. Bell had written a book (Monk is patients A-D) and that, unbeknownst to Adrian, he’d retired two months ago but kept him as his sole client. When Dr. Bell suspects Monk’s plan, he tries to remind Monk how many people love and appreciate him. The two even exchange emotional “I love you”s. (“I wanted to raise the stakes for Monk, and I always thought it’d be so funny if Monk and his shrink were passing Kleenex back and forth and weeping, and then Monk says, ‘This can’t be healthy,’” Breckman says.) Yet even after solving 140 homicides in his career, Monk looks at the newspaper headlines and tells Dr. Bell he feels as though he made no difference at all.

In the end, it’s Trudy who succeeds in convincing Monk to live. As he’s sitting at a picnic table in the park where he proposed to her, preparing to take the pills, she calls forth Griffin and other people whose murders Monk has solved — as well as one woman who’s still waiting for him to bring her justice and her family closure. Monk leaves the park, with them all walking behind him. If you cried (and we know you did, because we’re tearing up again just recapping it), you are not alone.

“I love the poet Robert Frost, and he famously once said, ‘If there are no tears for the writer, there are no tears for the reader.’ In other words, if you’re not crying while you write it, the reader is not gonna tear up either,” Breckman says. “And the truth is, I started thinking about this [movie] backwards — from that ending and worked backwards. That’s how important [the scene] was to me.”

Here, Shalhoub and Breckman answer a few of our burning questions.

TVLINE | After Monk confronts Rick Eden and refuses his payoff, Eden forces Monk off a cliff. Monk survives by clinging to an inflatable doll — and later says he told her things he’d never told anyone. What might he have confessed?
Breckman | When we were making the series, everyone always wondered how experienced Monk and Trudy were sexually. That was always a big secret in the show. I don’t even know the answer, if they ever consummated their relationship. Monk is the most chaste character in the history of the medium. And so, maybe he has regrets that he shared? [Laughs]
Shalhoub | I didn’t really think about what he was telling her. But I imagine, like Monk says, that she’s a good listener. [Laughs]

TVLINE | Monk penned goodbye letters to the people in his life. The only letter we get to read is his brief note to his old rival, Harold Krenshaw: “Dear Harold, Almost all is forgiven. Your ‘friend,’ Adrian Monk.” What didn’t Adrian forgive?
Shalhoub | [Laughs] Even though they made up in one episode, there are always things about each other that they couldn’t get past, and that’s just part of their illness. We tried a number of different ways to write and wrap up that letter. It was my idea to put “your friend” in quotation marks, because they always had this love-hate relationship.
Breckman | That’s a perfect reason why Tony is the best partner in the world. I was on the set watching him shoot that scene, and when he added those quotes, I died.

TVLINE | What do you think Monk wrote in the letter addressed to his brother, Ambrose?
Breckman | I’m very relieved that I didn’t have to actually write it. That might have been the hardest one to write. Their relationship was so complicated.
Shalhoub | I like to think that Monk would have written that Ambrose would be better off without him, and that Ambrose wouldn’t have to worry about Monk anymore. That it was an act of generosity and love, and it would come as a relief to Ambrose in a way.

TVLINE | In the final scene, Monk returns home to find Natalie has left Watson, the skittish, elderly poodle deemed unadoptable at the shelter, for him. How difficult was Watson to cast?
Breckman | Well, of course the dog had to look like Tony and act like Tony, and clean his cage on command. We were [shooting] in Toronto, and it’s not a long list of dogs. It was a little bit of a talent search for us.
Shalhoub | We had a number of dogs to audition. [Laughs] And we all had to weigh in, as with all the casting. I think that one was perfect. And Andy has a dog named Watson.
Breckman | Watson is a new puppy in our house. He’s just a big happy shepherd. And also, because Monk was so influenced by Sherlock Holmes, Watson is appropriate for that reason.

TVLINE | What was it like to film the scene in which Monk steps in dog poo and writhes on the ground pleading with Natalie to amputate his foot while other folks are running toward the man who was just blown up by a package bomb? It felt like classic Monk.
Shalhoub | That was a scene that I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to pull off. Is it going to be too broad? I mean, dog poop is funny. [Laughs] You can’t give that joke any level of sophistication, at all. And so instead, we just went all out. We thought, “Let’s get the nastiest, squishiest, awfulest-looking stuff we can use.” Because we would often try to do that during our eight seasons: We would alternate between very dark, poignant, emotionally-charged scenes and really silly, goofy scenes. And because we went as dark as we did with this movie, we have to balance that out with some really, really silly stuff. The other part of it is, I always liked the fact that Monk is not the most empathetic guy in the world. [Laughs] I mean, his problems always loom larger than other people’s problems. And I think that’s a nice contradiction about him: Yeah, he’s a nice guy. Yeah, he’s got integrity, blah, blah, blah. But he’s also got these human flaws. And that’s one of them, where he’s just self-obsessed.

TVLINE | Are we going to see another movie?
Breckman | I actually have an idea that I love for another movie. Of course, it’s not up to me. It’s up to the fans and to the TV gods.

Monk fans, what did you think of the new Peacock film? Let us know in the comments!