Thu 13 Aug 2020
I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.
I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.
I did not know him personally, outside of this blog, and I never met him in person. I would have liked to. His interests were many, but included TV shows, old time radio, comics and graphic novels, and light-hearted mystery fiction, and he wrote knowledgeably about all of them.
Michael was a long time fixture on the Mystery*File blog, and I will miss him tremendously.
August 13th, 2020 at 10:20 pm
Sorry for your loss…and the loss for all of us on the site. May he Rest In Peace.
August 13th, 2020 at 10:31 pm
Bad news indeed. He was a real expert and lover of old TV series and his knowledge will be missed. I just went back and looked again at some of his tv series reviews like THE SANDBAGGERS, THE OUTSIDER, HARRY O.
August 13th, 2020 at 10:52 pm
Not the news I want to end the day with.
I need someone in this world who’s at least as obsessive about all this as I am.
Worse yet – Michael Shonk was five years younger than I am.
RIP michaels …
August 13th, 2020 at 10:56 pm
I sensed something when he hadn’t shown up here for a few days. Sorry for all of us.
August 13th, 2020 at 11:21 pm
Michael’s last comments on this blog were on July 13th, following my review of the TV series FRANKIE DRAKE MYSTERIES:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=69586
He once told me about all of his various ailments. I began to be worried when I posted several later TV reviews, and no Michael.
August 14th, 2020 at 10:05 am
So sorry to hear this. I always enjoyed reading his stuff.
August 14th, 2020 at 7:15 pm
I had, of course, noticed he had not been appearing, but not knowing about his health had no idea. We will all miss him and his insight and knowledge, but what he left behind is preserved here, and his contribution to the genre he loved will not be forgotten.
August 14th, 2020 at 8:03 pm
I’m very sorry to hear that Mike has passed away. Although I, like Steve, never met him, Mike was a generous and invaluable resource when it came to studying the history of TV crime dramas. He often dropped me notes, commenting on Rap Sheet posts, and even sent me his DVD set of one mostly forgotten show, just so I could finally watch it.
I regret that I know so little about Mike. I’d often toyed with the idea of interviewing him for The Rap Sheet, but never quite got around to it. I don’t even know where he lived or what he did besides commenting on vintage TV mysteries. Regrettably, I missed my opportunity to learn the answers to those and so many other questions.
Good-bye, Mike. I’m glad to have had you as an entertaining correspondent, if only for such a brief while.
Cheers,
Jeff
August 21st, 2020 at 11:07 am
Jeff
I hope you don’t mind my reprinting this from your blog:
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-tv-addict-remembered.html
Saturday, August 15, 2020
A TV Addict Remembered
I never met Michael D. Shonk. Yet I often wanted to be him. For at least the last decade, he wrote about vintage radio shows, music, and mostly TV crime dramas for the Mystery*File blog. Remarkably prolific, he critiqued small-screen programs such as Cain’s Hundred, T.H.E. Cat, The Brothers Brannagan, The Outsider (see here and here), Banyon, Search, Harry O (here, here, and here), Matt Helm, Tucker’s Witch, Remington Steele, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He commented on teleflicks such as They Call It Murder and Marlowe, addressed the burgeoning of TV series remakes and the composing of top-notch TV themes, and late last year revealed his favorite 20 series of the last decade (2010-2019). Shonk also managed to spread his talents around, contributing several pieces to Criminal Element, including this remembrance of the troubled private-eye series The Cases of Eddie Drake, and this one about forgotten TV spy dramas.
He had what seemed like the best gig going.
As a fellow fan of TV crime series, I greeted each new Shonk story as an opportunity to learn more about the genre, and invariably to discover fresh details about even shows that I thought I knew well.
Unfortunately, those days are gone. Steve Lewis, Shonk’s editor at Mystery*File, announced this week that the columnist has died:
I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.
I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.
As I said before, I never had the chance to meet or talk in person with Michael Shonk. Over the years, though, as I wrote about classic TV crime, mystery, and espionage dramas for The Rap Sheet, he’d occasionally drop me an e-mail note or add a comment to a post here and there. I always found him to be kind and generous in his communications. After I remarked, in a 2012 post, that I had never seen a full episode of Darren McGavin’s 1968-1969 NBC-TV series, The Outsider, he sent me a DVD containing multiple episodes, which I greatly enjoyed watching.
I occasionally thought about interviewing Shonk, but never got around to it. Which is sad, because we shared an appreciation for the NBC Mystery Movie as well as for 1970s P.I. series, and my asking him questions about those subjects and so many others would surely have provided us all with entertainment and enlightenment. As he demonstrated in this Mystery*File post about a Season 1 installment of Mike Conners’ Mannix, Shonk enjoyed discussing with other TV enthusiasts the highs and lows of that medium.
Although he’s now passed away—and at a relatively early age, too—Shonk’s work for Mystery*File remains available (though a few YouTube videos he offered have disappeared). Should you have some leisure time coming in the near future, you could spend it in less valuable ways than to revisit his decade’s worth of posts.
August 14th, 2020 at 8:37 pm
One of the things I will remember Michael for, other than his contributions to the M*F blog, came earlier this year, when he explained to me the intricacies of YouTube and something that might be called “channels.”
Thusly he introduced me to tons of old TV shows various people have uploaded and are available for viewing. Until, that is, other people have come along and taken them down.
But until such time, I will be watching them and reporting on them here.
Michael also told me about all of the various TV series reviews and overviews he planned to do, when he had time to do them. He didn’t, alas, but I’m surely glad he did what he did.