Also, the original stories are models of their kind. Incredibly modern, dialogue-driven, fast paced and short! What better way to get back to the roots of these fantastic creations than to make Holmes and Watson living, breathing, modern men just as they had been originally?”
The creators of Sherlock’s central conceit is that Doyle never invented the fictional characters of Holmes and Watson, and their rich supporting cast. Instead, when, in A Study in Pink, their Watson meets his old medical colleague Stamford by chance, and is introduced to an eccentric searching for a flat-mate, the name Sherlock Holmes is new to him. Their meeting parallels the opening of A Study In Scarlet closely; Holmes effortlessly displays his brilliance by rattling off a series of accurate deductions about Watson. Instead of the immortal first words Doyle penned — “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” their Holmes asks their Watson, “Afghanistan or Iraq?,” before disclosing, in a segment that combines the verbal explanations for the deductions with tight camera shots of the telling clues, how he knew that the good doctor had recently been in combat. Moffat and Gatiss also borrow freely from The Sign of the Four in this episode, but instead of having Holmes announcing remarkably-accurate details about Watson’s brother from his examination of a pocket-watch, they have him work his intellectual wizardry on the cell-phone Watson carries. Doyle’s Holmes magazine essay. “The Book of Life,” which Watson famously dismisses as “ineffable twaddle,” is replaced by Sherlock’s website, The Science of Deduction.
In keeping with the multi-media approach to booming TV series these days, you can actually visit that website, complete with a forum, hidden messages for visitors to decode, and a list of archived case files that play upon Doyle’s habit of having Watson refer to cases he has written up but not published, for one reason or another. Those archived cases include ones derived from the original Watson’s untold tales, such as that of the Abernetty Family, and titles (“The Killer Cats of Greenwich,” “The Man With Four Legs,”) that pay homage to the long-running radio series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that began with Rathbone and Bruce reprising their roles. All three episodes are replete with clever twists on the originals that often undercut the expectations of viewers who remember what certain clues meant when Doyle used them. In today’s smoke-free environment, Sherlock dubs a case a three-nicotine patch problem, rather than a three-pipe one. Pointing out more would vitiate the pleasure for those who have not yet seen the series; suffice to say that none of the updates or inversions strike a false chord.
But a well-constructed framework is not in itself enough to explain the success and popularity of the series. The cleverness of the writing extends to character and plot as well. A Study in Pink, and the third episode, The Great Game, both do a laudable job of playing fair with the viewer, and repeat viewings will reveal how crucial evidence was placed before the viewer early on. Bits and pieces of a number of canonical stories are artfully employed. While A Study in Pink primarily derives from A Study in Scarlet, the other two episodes, especially The Great Game, borrow from a number of original cases, including The Dancing Men, and The Bruce-Partington Plans (with a missile substituted for the naval submarine of the original). The Great Game has Holmes racing deadlines set by a homicidal madman to solve seemingly-unrelated crimes in order to save a hostage’s life, and The Blind Banker, the least-strong episode of the three, has the detective trying to find out why strange symbols have been painted on the interior wall of a bank. Again, saying more about the plots for those who have not had the pleasure of experiencing them would do a disservice to the careful work of the writers Moffat, Gatiss and Stephen Thompson, but any reader interested in discussing them is welcome to email me at the address at the end of my bio line below.
For many, the convolutions of the puzzles will take a back seat to the dynamic portrayals of Holmes and Watson by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Both are instantly convincing in their parts. Cumberbatch combines arrogance, brilliance, and quirkiness, without making the concept of a modern-day genius serving as a consulting detective anything less than fully plausible. As in the originals, the humanity of the shows is brought out by Watson, here personified by Freeman as a capable professional in his own right, who needs only a focus for his morality, loyalty and intellect that he finds as Holmes’s assistant. Their rapport develops quickly, and the development of their bond of friendship is much more convincing than in other portrayals, such as those that diminish Watson’s own strengths to the point of caricature.
When the 2009 Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie brought Holmes back to the big screen for the first time in almost thirty years, many hoped that the robust box office sales would translate into a renewed appreciation for the original stories and characters. Surprisingly, that hope is more likely to be realized by Sherlock, which just a month or so after appearing on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre has become a surprising big seller on DVD. My efforts, in the fall of 2010 to buy a copy in New York City, at one of a dozen branches of megagiant Barnes & Noble over the course of several weeks were unsuccessful; every store in the metropolitan area was sold out, and the demand for the not-inexpensive 2-disk set was so great that Barnes & Noble’s warehouses were also out of stock, meaning that shoppers would need to wait about a month to get a copy. In an experience of buying Sherlockian DVDs that extends over two decades and two continents, I have never encountered such a phenomenon. I look forward to the countless scholarly analyses of the programs that I expect will be forthcoming on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the promise of the second season, which may include an episode that is somehow inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles. Devotees of the detective and the doctor owe Moffat and Gatiss a debt of gratitude for reinvigorating them, and keeping their memories green.
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Lenny Picker, a freelance writer living in 21st-century New York, has not (yet) been called a high-functioning sociopath. He can be reached at [email protected].
THE BBC’S “SHERLOCK” — A REVIEW, by M J Elliott
“Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character of fiction created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the day he remains — as ever — the supreme master of deductive reasoning.”
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These words preceded the early entries in the Universal series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, by way of explaining the presence of Holmes and Watson in the then-modern world of 1942. In a way, it’s peculiar that the makers felt the need to go to such trouble, since none of the many earlier films took place in Victorian England. It’s a testament to the effect Rathbone’s first two movies — The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — must have had on the film-going population at the time. Since then, the detective’s cinematic adventures have remained firmly in period, with the exception of a couple of TV movies, both of which see him awakened from cryogenic suspension in the America of the late ’80s/early ’90s.
It was not until that other iconic character Doctor Who enjoyed his recent revival that the notion of updating the stories became a real possibility. Who scriptwriters Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss shared a love of those Universal films, and would often discuss their mutual enthusiasm. “We thought they were actually rather more fun,” says Moffat, “and in certain ways truer to the originals than many grander and more important film versions. And what we kept saying to each other was, ‘Someday, someone is going to do Sherlock Holmes in the modern day, and we’ll feel so cross because we should have done it.’” In fact, a US TV pilot, Elementary by Josh Friedman, did just that, but the production never saw the light of day. Moffat and Gatiss, however, were more fortunate. A sixty-minute pilot proved so satisfying that the BBC commissioned three film-length episodes, which meant that the pilot had to be scrapped and remounted (thankfully, the abandoned show can be seen as an extra on the DVD).
Young actor Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as the