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.