Z/Web

Author: Lee Goldberg

This is the first non-Monk of Lee’s I’ve read and I wasn’t sure what to expect. My first surprise was that the wonderful witty humor I love from the Monk books is fully on display here, in this hilarious skewering of Hollywood television industry. My second surprise was the decidedly adult nature of the writing and plot: sex scenes, murder and gore, porn stars, and a lot of rather disgusting imagery abound. It’s done for appropriate reasons, for the most part, and it’s meant to be funny, but it’s sure a switch from the G-rated Monk series. It perhaps needs a warning label for Monk fans. Beyond that, it’s actually a pretty great read. It’s wild, perhaps too wild, as some of things were so over-the-top they pushed me into disbelief (such as the sitcom dog that bites a man’s hand clean off). But I love the core concept of a mobster simply killing off the competition in his time slot so the TV show he’s financing will get better ratings. The plot’s crazy, with blackmail, murder, and everyone in TV land out to destroy everyone else, but if you take it as parody, it’s works. My favorite was the fake networks and TV shows: they are hilariously ridiculous but enough like real shows to be fully plausible, and some actually sound cool enough to get on the air (like Frankencop, about a cop pieced together from dead body parts). Lee has been in TV for ages and it shows, as he nails everything Hollywood. (Some aspects are dated, as it’s obvious the book was written in the mid-1990s.) It’s a terrific education in the making of television as well as an entertaining spoof. There’s more action than mystery solving, though, but it’s still fun.