It really can be any diversion but I can only take just so much of Trump and MAGA news that finding an engaging streaming TV show with numerous episodes to watch helps me relax my mind. When my partner and I aren’t watching TV together I have taken to watchiing reruns of Monk where I am on season four.

Click to read reviews.

Monk is one of the most frustrating TV shows ever to appear on TV. This is because Monk, the utterly brilliant detective, is constantly inhibited in his investigations by his deblitiating obsessive-compulsive disoder (OCD) and his between 100-300 phobias (listed here). Only very rarely does he overcome his fear when someone’s life is in imminent danger and only he can save them.

When the show was being aired it was criticized for using a real disorder as an entertainment device (read “Why Monk Stunk” in Psychology Today) but as a therapist I find it so overdrawn that I can see even someone with severe OCD might enjoy it. After all, he manages despite his disorder to catch the horribly arrogant bad criminals in every episode (Ranker lists the 10 worst here.)

As frustrating, sometimes infuriating, as it is watching Monk succumb to the rituals that rule his life as they cause setbacks in his solving the crime or pursing the perpetrator, losing yourself in this feeling can be cathartic because in the end, for all his nearly losing because of his OCD, he always wins.

In one case he had to prove that Willie Nelson hadn’t committed a murder (Monk and the Red Headed Stranger, review). At the end they played a duet. In a subsquent episode when someone brought this up and said Willie even gave him one of his harmonicas Monk said he threw it away because of… germs.

It is also satisfying to watch some cops who don’t know of his reputation underestmate him and get end up with egg on their faces. Of course San Fransicsco detectives Capt. Stottlemeyer and Lt. Disher know he is infallible and enlist his aid all of the time.

In fact, the state troopers shown below didn’t believe monk about a murder occurring on the highway and ended up locking him in the back of their police car.

Addendum:

If you have OCD there are effective treatments available.

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