admin Did it take any convincing for you to come back?
Not for me. I was thrilled to get the phone call. This is the greatest creation of my professional life. It really was like getting a band back together—a band that enjoyed making music and touring for seven years—and then getting back in the garage and picking up their instruments again.
Had there been any other attempts to revive it in the past?
When the show first ended, I pitched a different movie. This is now going back 12 or 13 years. It was just not the right time: it was expensive, the network was going through some changes, and the timing wasn’t right. But these things all happen for a reason. You don’t understand them at the moment. But looking back, of course, I’m grateful that we waited and I’m grateful that we’re doing it now.
Do you remember what the plot was supposed to be?
It was called Mr. Monk For Mayor. And for Adrian Monk to solve a case, he had to run for mayor of San Francisco and get elected because, for some reason which I can’t remember, only the mayor had access to certain information. The fun of that movie was he’s so wholesome and honest that the town really did rally around him. Also, I think a town really would rally around him. He had solved 120 high profile homicides.
What was the calculus of doing a movie versus reviving it as a series? We’ve seen a few shows come back now—Frasier just did, for instance—so was there ever any talks about trying more Monk episodes?
No, we always talked about it as a feature film, because we wanted to justify coming back. We wanted to make it bigger than just “episode 126” would’ve been. We wanted to make it feel big and make the stakes high and spend some money on production values. If we were going to come back after 13 or 14 years, we wanted to do it right.
And you did get pretty much everyone in the original cast to come back. How’d you manage that?
Well, I was so flattered because they all agreed to come back before they read the script. So they gave me the benefit of the doubt. I hope they still feel that was a smart decision, but everyone was so enthusiastic. It was such an important part of all our lives and the fact that Randy (Zisk) just was going to be directing it and David Hoberman was going to be producing it and it was going to be NBC again, the creative team was all in place, which I think made everyone very comfortable.
