"To illustrate just how formulaic Monk is, every episode of the show features the question "What are you doing?" or some variation of it."

It's funny you mentioned that. There's the episode where Sarah Silverman figures out the actor was the murderer by recognizing his wife's scream of "what are you doing?!" from her old movie. I think they must have had Bitty record it, because there are other times when she shouts it at Monk and it sounds absolutely identical to me. I always wondered if that was an inside joke.