The final season of the show that made USA famous for something other than playing non-stop reruns of Wings is turning into a reunion special. Or should I say a special reunion?

Bitty Schram, the actress who played Sharona, Adrian Monk's original partner in fighting crime on Monk, will return for an episode sometime during the show's eighth and final season.

This will mark her first appearance on the comedy-mystery since she mysteriously disappeared from the show halfway through the third season. It should also make for an interesting close to a series that has redefined the way the higher channels on the dial create and produce their own series.

It's been a gift ... and a curse. But the brilliant, obsessive-compulsive detective known as Mr. Monk will be solving his last crime at the end of the eighth season next summer. With ratings still high on the USA Network, he's going out at the top of his game.

Monk is one of those shows that struck a chord with viewers, because we saw a little of ourselves in the phobic detective played brilliantly by Tony Shalhoub. Ok, so maybe we don't all iron our shoelaces and avoid doorknobs like ... well, like the plague. But like Monk, we've all got issues.

And like Monk, some of us have trouble getting out of our own way. For him, that meant losing his detective job with the San Francisco Police Department.

On Friday, July 18th, the seventh season of Monk will premiere on the USA network. For some this is incredibly good news, particularly since the show will be celebrating its 100th episode come September. For others, season seven is three or four seasons too many. It's these people who think Adrian Monk should retire to a Feung Shui-styled, completely dust-free room to live out his remaining days lamenting about his lost love Trudy.

Fortunately, Tony Shalhoub doesn't want Monk to retire. In a recent interview the actor who plays the obsessive-compulsive Mr. Monk said that there is plenty more to explore about the character and the people around him. This is especially true thanks to the revelations of the season six finale, which opened up a whole new avenue for Monk to find the killer of his wife. That, and the introduction of a new therapist into Monk's life (due to the sudden death of Stanley Kamel), have the seventh season looking interesting.