But in the end, Sherlock wasn't interested in being a voice of reason in a noisy, inflammatory time. There's always room in pop culture for a voice that inspires us to look at things rationally, to think absurd and outlandish or even infuriating things through carefully that the most likely answer to an injustice isn't necessarily the correct one, that the desire to find someone to blame often supersedes the need to find the person responsible. Something about Holmes resonates, and will continue to, but it seems like Sherlock has missed it. The Mentalist and Psych are long-running procedurals about guys who are really good at observation and deduction. Some of these adaptations are less so, changing just enough to warrant the creation of an entirely new character. and Guy Ritchie did a pair of Holmes films in 20. Some of these are explicit: Elementary is the American take on Sherlock, bringing Holmes to New York City and casting Lucy Liu as Joan Watson. Sherlock Holmes has been rebooted on television and film dozens of times. ![]() But it doesn't really have to, because the words "Sherlock Holmes" kind of sell themselves. Which is a shame, because it would've been interesting for Sherlock to explore this idea more, or to do something with its modern setting other than show what Sherlock Holmes looked like solving mysteries in it. Sherlock doesn't do much with this statement, but it's the closest it comes to answering the question of why Sherlock Holmes in 2017. It argues that all the data, all the cleverness and guile and power we have to discover and manipulate things with our smartphones and the internet, none of it's worth much without empathy. In the fourth season (and perhaps, series) finale, "The Final Problem," the show makes something of a thesis statement. He literally out-clevers situations just by talking very fast about being clever, and we don't really learn anything from it other than that Sherlock Holmes is very clever, which is something we knew before we started watching the damn show.īut there's one thing it never does, which few adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes canon ever bother with: addressing why we need Sherlock now, in the 2010s. But as Moriarty becomes more of a prominent figure, it stops being the way he solves mysteries, and instead becomes the means by which he escapes death traps built for him and others, outsmarting not just criminals but supercriminals, clandestine government operatives, and death itself. At first, this is just a way to show how Holmes brain is so very different from everyone else's, a way to dramatize the very undramatic act of thinking very hard. This is kind of apparent from the very start-one of the early strokes of genius that Sherlock landed on from the very start is in its portrayal of Holmes' thought process, summoning up text and images and maps onscreen he recalls them in his brain, sorting and editing and emphasizing as he races to a conclusion. It also meant that the mistakes that would sink the show were there right from the beginning, because Sherlock wanted to be a modern show, and Sherlock Holmes isn't really compatible with how we make modern shows. This meant the good episodes (usually two of them every season, sometimes one and a half) really stood out, while the okay or bad ones (usually the middle episode) didn't linger all that long in the memories of fans. It was also memorable because it was brief: The first season of Sherlock, like every one thereafter, consisted of three 90-minute mysteries, loosely tied together with a running thread that usually led to the climax of the final episode. ![]() It's a pitch-perfect reboot when reboot-mania was starting to take hold, playfully referencing famous Sherlock Holmes stories while also offering something new and modern, something that synthesized things both well-known (221B Baker Street, Lestrade, Watson) and less so (Mycroft Holmes, for example). and the following fall in the States, "A Study in Pink" was remarkably clever television on several levels. The first episode of Sherlock premiered in what feels like an entirely different world.
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