I decided to catch myself up on some now-classic TV and ran across this episide from the TV show Monk:

https://monk.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Monk_and_the_Red-Headed_Stranger

Overall, I thought that it was a good representation of musicians on TV. Willie Nelson came across as a warm, giving and thoughtful person who I would expect to be wonderful to work with as a fellow musician. And the editing of this episode took advantage of Nelson’s musicianship by having a couple of scenes where they simply held on his performance and let it happen, which I found pretty refreshing. In modern editing, shows seem to be allergic to actual music happening and it tends to get cut only after a few seconds to establish that “music happened”, if even that.

Tony Shalhoub (the actor who played Adrian Monk) played some clarinet in the episode and I’m impressed to find out that he did not actually play clarinet, meaning that he had to learn for that episode given whatever time he had to prepare for it how to play some very simply lines without any clarinet background. That’s pretty unusual, and I expect that Tony did actually have some musical background on some other instrument in his personal history somewhere.

There is one event that strikes me as very wrong, however. In a climatic scene where Monk is invited to play on clarinet with Nelson, one of the other musicians (maybe that character was supposed to be a tech?) grabs Monk’s clarinet and blows into the mouthpiece. Monk ,as a character, is severely germophobic, so I’m sure they added that to play to the character’s weakness and make it very awkward and comedic for him to try to perform after that. However, this is a HUGE NO-NO for ANY wind musician. I will never, never play into one of my bandmate’s musical instruments, ever, unless given explicit permission, and with proper safety precautions, such as using a spare mouthpiece. And I certainly would not doing any such thing right before a performance starts.

That really annoyed me. Nelson himself was there along with some other actors who could actually play musical instruments. They should have known better, and they should have instantly caught and criticized that directorial decision before it was ever filmed.

Folks: don’t mess with musicians’ instruments.