Tonight brings the season premieres of the mystery-comedy shows Monk and Psych on USA Network. I’ve written extensively on thse two programs, on this site and elsewhere, and am looking forward to the new season of each. (See articles here, here, here, here, and here, for more info on these two programs.)

It will be interesting to gauge the quality of the new season’s episodes. Psych, now going into its second year of production, was pretty good at the beginning and got better as the season went on. I think we can expect continued improvement.

Monk, on the other hand, is now going into its sixth season. Most fiction TV series start getting a bit stale by the fifth year, and Monk did seem slightly less inspired last season. To overcome that problem, series tend to change some characters and major situations around the fifth and sixth year.

Monk consists of only about half as many episodes per season as major network programs, so the problem is not as dire. However, I, for one, would like to see stronger mystery puzzles this year, as I felt that was the weakest element of last year’s programs. Let’s hope the producers realized that and have corrected it. We’ll know soon enough.