Amazon Prime's best-ever detective show returns to streaming – many seasons score 100%

Detective shows are a fairly fantastic genre if you start to get into them, and there are a whole heap of shows to pick from, including a wide range of older series that aren't in production any more. One of the downsides of the streaming age, though, is that we're all a little bit beholden to streaming services with libraries that come and go.

Still, the other side of that coin is that sometimes a cult classic will arrive back on a streaming service and change your life. That's what could happen to you now that Monk is on Amazon Prime Video here in the US in its entirety – this is one of the best detective shows ever, with a unique and brilliant central character.

Adrian Monk is a retired detective who's struggling to deal with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but finds that helping to solve cases on a freelance basis gives him something to focus on. He's an idiosyncratic protagonist, one who can be spiky and unlikeable at times, but he almost always shines through with impish humour and, crucially, genius levels of deduction.

In fact, while I'm not going to hold the show up as a shining example of a perfect on-screen representation of neurodivergence, it's certainly trying its best on that front, for its time. Frankly, though, you can get a really good sense of the tone of the show, and its strengths, by just checking out the very first scene of the pilot episode, which I've embedded below.

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It showcases nicely the way Monk moves through a crime scene, getting hung up on details that seem completely unrelated (and often are), but nonetheless showing a sharp eye for the bits that matter. The only part of the show that's better, frankly, is the conclusion of each episode, which almost always involves Monk revealing the truth of the crime in a dramatic and dry fashion.

It's a tradition that is equally well-executed in the likes of Columbo, but Monk made it all of its own. The show also got rave reviews throughout most of its run, with Rotten Tomatoes tallying up multiple 100% scores for various seasons.

So, if you're on the lookout for a low-maintenance show that has some fabulous mysteries to uncover, and you're a Prime Video subscriber, you're in luck. Amazon wants to have the best streaming service on the planet, and this addition has helped it a little bit more.