Opening with closure …

On Friday night, as I was watching the last moments of the Monk season finale, I noticed something. The last scene apparently was set up so it would be easy to film an extra bit or reloop some dialogue and, if the episode turned out to be the show’s finale, name the person behind Trudy’s murder. Although there’s always a mystery, Monk has always been as much about the widowed detective’s inability to solve the murder of his wife, so anyone who’s been watching regularly would have wanted that bit of closure.With the writers’ strike ruling the 2007-08 season, the networks have learned to let shows run their full orders, answering one favorite viewer gripe. Maybe closure should be the next lesson that the networks–and show production teams–should work on.