Actors in Other Roles: Not Everyone Stayed in Sunnydale - Page 4 - Buffy The Vampire Slayer

So, I never had much interest in the series Monk, the long-running procedural starring Tony Shalhoub as a hyper-phobic ex-detective.  But my DVR glitched, I had a lot of space and I said "what could it hurt to look?"

So it turns out that the episode (8.04, "Mr. Monk is Someone Else") is a perfect example of why Döppelgängland is so great.  Many TV shows, when they get lazy or out of ideas (hey, it's season 8, okay?  BtVS ran off the rails a bit before that, IMO), have episodes where an actor plays a double role, hamming it up as a guest-star who just happens to completely resemble the regular.

Now, in sci-fi/fantasy you can pull this off:  Captain Kirk is split in two, so we get an examination of the various parts of his psyche.  A villain has shape-shifting powers, confusing the heroes.  We're in an alternate dimension, and the Halliwell sisters are evil here!  And so on.

But in the mundane world, what do we get?  Monk just happens to have a look-alike, who is a contract killer, so when the hit man gets run over by a bus, the FBI (Reed Diamond of Homicide: Life on the Street) asks Monk to impersonate "Frankie" and stop the planned "hit".

Of course this is stupid beyond stupid, because Noted Whack-Job Adrian Monk can't credibly pretend to be anyone other than Noted Whack-Job Adrian Monk and not only would this crap have a very high risk of "Jimmy Barlow" (the guy who hired "Frankie") whacking Noted Whack-Job Adrian Monk, and then hiring somebody else to kill the guy "Frankie" was contracted for and probably killing a bunch of innocents trying to find out who squealed on him.  But of course, Monk completely pulls it off, which really isn't so hard, as Tony Shalhoub is not, in fact, Noted Whack-Job Adrian Monk but an actor and it's not exactly hard for him to put on different clothes and say scripted lines.  It's rather his raison d'être, to paraphrase Spike.

So why did I keep watching (well, skimming, only stopping occasionally)?  Because the lead guest-star was Eric Balfour, playing the gangster's weaselly son, "Lenny".  Balfour actually didn't have much to do and his idea of characterization was apparently limited to wearing a hat.  Well done, Balfour.  Sigh.

In the end, Monk turns his gun on the nefarious Barlows, the FBI goes in and Balfour and the rest are marched off…but not before the FBI taunts them by telling them that "Frankie" is actually dead and calling Monk by name in front of them.   Yeah, that's smart.

And thus endeth my interest in ever watching another episode of Monk.  But, to be fair, once you've seen The Eric Balfour Episode, what's left?  (Seriously, it's at least 8 seasons, so 175+ episodes. What are the odds?)

Tony Shalhoub was in The Siege with Mark Valley, who was on Boston Legal with Christian "Balthazar" Clemenson

Ted Levine was, of course, putting the lotion in the basket in The Silence of the Lambs, with Anthony Hopkins, who was in The Human Stain with Gage Petronzi

and Traylor Howard spent several seasons of Two Guys, a Girl, a Pizza Place, Several Other Locations, and Nathan Fillion Downstairs dating said Nathan Fillion, so that's that.

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