Mr. Monk and the stalker

Fans of good basic-cable detective series in the vein of TNT's "The Closer" and USA's "Burn Notice" have one more reason to be cheerful this summer: Adrian Monk is back.

And what a funny, satisfying way for "Monk" to come back for its sixth season. Tonight at 9 on USA, the obsessive-compulsive, germophobic sleuth played by Tony Shalhoub returns to help out an old nuisance, a stalker named Marci Maven, played hilariously by Sarah Silverman.

Fans of the show will remember Marci from the Season 2 episode "Mr. Monk and the TV Star." Marci runs a Web site called the Monk Museum. She collects items Monk has discarded, such as old furniture. She wears his old pants. She has a Monk shrine in her kitchen.

She's trouble. And now, she's in big trouble. In tonight's episode, a neighbor has been killed in what appears to be a mauling attack by her dog. Marci swears the dog died days earlier, but the victim's husband is adamant the pooch did it.

Guess whom she calls to help her out? That doesn't make Monk very happy, especially at a time when he's been called upon to participate in a bachelor auction to benefit the widows of police officers killed on the job.

"It's always the widows," he complains to his long-suffering assistant Natalie Teeger, played by Traylor Howard. "Why don't they just move on?"

Shalhoub is hilarious as always, conveying his character's discomfort and outright revulsion at just about every little thing we encounter in the course of daily living.

But it's the big things that really throw him, and provide the most laughs, like when he has to follow uberconfident, shirtless police Lt. Randall Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford) on the bachelor auction block.

Still, his main torment this episode is Marci, and Silverman is a comic marvel playing a stock character of her own creation.

The selfish, unself-aware Marci is very much like the person Silverman plays on her own Comedy Central show "The Sarah Silverman Program."

Both characters do the same sort of double-takes, the same sort of nasty little asides, and both have a cheerful way of saying the most outrageous things.

But let's not forget Howard, whose reactions to Silverman's character are just as priceless. Every nutso statement or attempt by jealous Marci to start an eye fight with Natalie is met with a "you-gotta-be-kidding-me" look, and Howard never seems to run out of different ways to shoot those looks. That's no surprise -- poor Natalie must have looked that way at her boss plenty of times over the years.

"That woman is as obsessive and compulsive as you are," she complains to Monk as Marci tries to encroach on her job.

It's infuriating for her, but at least Natalie can take a little pleasure in Monk getting a little taste of what it's like to deal with him.

"We'll compare notes," she needles him.

As mysteries go, the episode "Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan" is a clever one, although the mystery element of the show will never be quite as important as the comic moments.

In the B and C story lines, Disher plays big brother to the young son of the woman who purchased him at the auction. Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) is unable to keep his mind off work long enough to pay proper attention to his sexy love interest Linda Fusco, a recurring character played by Raleigh's Sharon Lawrence (last seen on The CW's short-lived "Hidden Palms.")

Both minor story lines play well in the brief time allotted to them, and tie in well with the main one (especially for Disher -- you'll see).

All in all, it's a grade-A "Monk" episode, one of the elite can't-miss hours of TV this week.