Late last year, while preparing to interview the actor Tony Shalhoub, I decided to watch a couple of episodes of his long-running TV series Monk, a show I had previously known from such places as playing in the background at my grandma’s house. “What if we become Monkheads?” my husband joked as we settled in to start the first episode.

A few months and 96 episodes later, I can say with the utmost sincerity: we’re Monkheads now.

Monk originally aired from 2002 to 2009 on USA Network, parallel to but a world apart from the shows that would come to define the Golden Age of Television—The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire. It was immensely popular, with its finale setting a cable ratings record of 9.4 million viewers, the majority skewing older than the 18-49 range. Shalhoub plays Adrien Monk, a former San Francisco homicide detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose fastidiousness and attention to detail make him incomparably gifted at solving crimes. But his condition spiraled when his beloved wife Trudy was murdered and he was stripped of his police badge, leading him to work as a private detective and a consultant for the force instead. Ostensibly, he is trying to solve Trudy’s murder throughout the series, but that storyline only moves forward once every season or so, leaving the rest of the episodes devoted to individual murder cases and their tidy resolutions.

If I initially approached Monk with some ironic detachment, I found it dissolving with each subsequent episode. I was charmed by his mouthy Jersey girl assistant Sharona (Bitty Schram) and had a visceral feeling of betrayal, 15 years too late, when they suddenly wrote her off the show and replaced her with Natalie (Traylor Howard). I was increasingly attracted to the hardboiled, robustly mustachioed Captain Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine, best known as … Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs), even when it dawned on me that he was written specifically to be sexy to women in the 55+ age range. (Monk is otherwise a decidedly sex-free zone; Shalhoub told the Huffington Post in 2017 that he belives Monk is still a virgin.) And I was delighted by the surprising slate of guest stars, like Willie Nelson, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Dratch, and Carmen Electra, among others. Any Best Show fans reading should also know that Tom Scharpling was the writer and executive producer for several seasons, and his co-host Jon Wurster has a writing credit for an episode in season six.