I’m not usually an early adopter when it comes to TV. The way I see it, time spent in front of the tube is pretty much wasted, and my leisure time is too precious to waste on something that’s not actually good. Instead – at least, until I started FanStuff – I let other people blaze the trails and map out the best shows for me.

So when I started watching “Monk” after hearing about the show on “Morning Edition” in 2004, it already had more than a season under its belt and had picked up its share of critical acclaim.  Even so, it took me a while to make the commitment to start at the beginning, watching the whole series first on DVD and then on Hulu. Episodes could telegraph their endings – I often said, “That’s the guy!” long before Monk did – but that didn’t really matter. I had a soft spot for Monk, the former detective who never recovered from the loss of his wife, Trudy.

Even though “Monk” had its share of predictability, plot holes and continuity problems, its last season was, in the mechanics of ending things, really strong. “Monk” started off on tricky territory because it introduced a long-running mystery in its premiere: Who killed Trudy Monk? The show didn’t make the mistake of solving that mystery in the middle of things without a plan for what to do next, a la “Twin Peaks.” It didn’t take the “Lost” approach of piling on more mysteries until the show seemed to get, well, lost. And “Monk” didn’t, after the style of “Battlestar Galactica,” use its final moments to write off all its mysteries in a way that undermined the earlier episodes.

Instead, the last season of “Monk” – here come the spoilers – walked a fine line between serving fans and serving the story. In a collection of episodes that executive producer Andy Breckman called “milestone episodes,” the show tied up loose ends and tossed out points fans had been asking for. Will Monk get his badge back? Will we ever see Sharona again? Will Monk ever get better? So many shows end with big mysteries unsolved and unmentioned, so the care the creators of “Monk” took to space out a series of resolutions in season eight was refreshing. (Of course, I have no idea why nobody thought to call Monk’s brother Ambrose during the finale.)

At the same time, I’m glad the mystery of who killed Trudy had virtually nothing to do with anything mentioned earlier in the series, since fans who have immersed themselves in the show’s tropes and rhythms probably would have said, “That’s the guy!” seasons ago.

I mean, how many times did you look at the screen and say (or think) “The wipes! It’s the wipes!” in these last two episodes?

More on the world of Monk at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Private Investigators Work
How Obsessive-compulsive Disorder Works
How Grief Works