Adrian Monk is the protagonist of the television series Monk, portrayed by Tony Shalhoub. A former homicide detective in the San Francisco Police Department, his obsessive-compulsive disorder (severely intensified by the death of his wife) interfered with his job, resulting in a still-current suspension.

He is still mourning his wife Trudy, who was killed by a car bomb in 1997. He has not yet fully solved the case, although he has been able to discover that the car bomb was built by Warrick Tennyson for a six-fingered male. Monk has devoted the last eight years of his life not just to consulting with San Francisco police detectives on various cases, but to finding the man who murdered his wife. Viewers are lead to believe that she faked her own death in one episode (the episode when Monk is finally cured), but this was actually a con set up to gain access to a storage locker in her co-worker's possession (ending with Monk relapsing into OCD).

He has several phobias, including milk, heights, crowds, and germs. Oddly enough, he isn't affected by the sight of blood. His condition is so severe that he requires a nurse (or as he calls it, an assistant) to help him get through the day. Besides dealing with his OCD, Monk's assistants also appear to have a hands-on role in organising his consultancy work, in particular ensuring that he (and, by extension, they) get paid, a thankless task given Monk's complete indifference to financial matters. His former assistant, Sharona Fleming, quit after several years of loyal service to her boss to go back to New Jersey and remarry her ex-husband. His new assistant, Natalie Teeger, is now just starting to figure out her new boss.

While his obsessive attention to minute detail cripples him socially, e.g. necessitating a police officer to leave a scene of crime Monk was investigating in one episode because he was wearing subtly different socks and it was distracting Monk, it makes him a gifted detective and profiler; he has an uncanny ability to reconstruct entire crimes based on little more than scraps of detail that seem unimportant (if noticed at all) by his colleagues. Despite his OCD, which causes him to always put everything-no matter how insignificant it may be-in its proper place, he is always careful not to disturb a crime scene.

Though it is stated in the pilot that his obsessive compulsive disorder is a result of his wife's murder, he still shows signs of it in flashbacks where he is with Trudy or before he met her, even as a child. It is strongly hinted that his parents were very strict and over-protective, which may also have contributed to his disorder. It appears that Monk, before his wife's murder, had his symptoms mostly under control, but it wasn't until Trudy's death that he lost control of his OCD and his condition went into a downward spiral.

Monk has a brother, Ambrose (played by John Turturro), who suffers from extreme agoraphobia and rarely leaves his home. Their father abandoned the family when they were children, which had a profound impact on their respective illnesses; the chaos and emotional instability brought about their father's sudden absence created in them a pathological need for order and self-control. While Ambrose still believes in their father's return (to the point of setting an extra plate at the dinner table in case he comes back), Adrian has refused to forgive him.

Monk characters | Fictional detectives | Fictional Californians | Obsessive-compulsive fictional characters | Fictional widows and widowers

Adrian Monk