MR. MONK AND THE BIG REWARD
by Hy Conrad
A work day for the writing staff usually consists of sitting around the bullpen, coming up with ideas and outlining stories. The actual script-writing is done later by individual writers.
One day, over our morning coffee, someone said, "You know what would be a fun way to hide a small piece of evidence? Stick it to a wad of gum under a table."
"Why would you do that?" someone asked.
"Well," someone else said, getting into the spirit. "Maybe you have the evidence on you when you're brought in for interrogation. You know you're going to be arrested and searched, so ..."
And that's how this story began.
We immediately put in a call to John, our police consultant, and he confirmed our logic.
"Yeah, people do hide things in interrogation rooms."
Good. What we needed next was a theme.
For three years, we had a card on our wish list: "Monk goes after a reward".
If we came up with a story about a stolen gem held in place by the wad of gum, then we could finally use this card.
Of course, Monk had to solve the case but he couldn't win the reward and get rich. That would change his life too much. So someone else had to find the gem by accident.
And what better person than a cleaning lady -– a cleaning lady who hates Monk.
To make the race for the reward more interesting, Monk needed competition. The original idea was to have one other reward chaser, a Dog, the Bounty Hunter-type.
But pitting Monk against a single detective was too similar to a previous episode. So, we settled on three detectives.
Throughout the first draft, one of the detectives was a Jessica Fletcher-type. But Jessica Fletcher exists only in fiction. There is no counterpart in real life, and we didn't want our fiction to reference other fiction. So her character changed sexes and morphed into a retired Scotland Yard man.
In the writers' room, we had a lot of fun with the mantra clue -– pages of set-ups and jokes about mantras. Almost all of them fell by the wayside.
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