Sherlock: A Study in Awesome
by Stephen Simons
America has borrowed a lot from Britain’s fictional sources over the last few hundred years. Whether through subconscious influences or direct pulls like Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson, we have found a lot of inspiration from our mother country. From The Office to shows like The Tomorrow People, Being Human, Queer as Folk, Cash Cab — even American Idol, we have shamelessly ripped-off British television. And in most cases (with the obvious exception of The Office), ours turn out inferior to their predecessors. So it’s nice to see the trend reverse itself every now and then.
In 2010, the BBC debuted a 90-minute-per-episode ‘buddy cop’ mystery show called Sherlock, and they stole the characters and idea directly from a popular American show called House M.D. I know, one show is about a ‘consulting detective’ and the other show is about a ‘consulting investigative doctor,’ but bear with me here and pay attention to some of the details.
Hugh Laurie (a British import, dang it!) plays Dr. Gregory House – a brilliant diagnostician who is addicted to pain killers, plays a piano to think, is oblivious to others’ feelings to an almost sociopathic degree, and thinks best when he’s talking out loud and belittling the intelligence of those around him. He solves mysteries with a combination of his incredible intelligence, uncanny deductive abilities, and convenient encyclopedic knowledge of all things relevant to his case. Also, his name is House (Holmes . . . homes . . . House . . . get it?). His best friend and closest adviser is Wilson (Watson/Wilson). Also the woman who oversees him and takes heat for his antics is Lisa Cutty (Le Strad/Lisa) . . . okay, it breaks down a little bit there, but you get the point!
(Now some people will suggest that House M.D. may have been loosely inspired by the character Sherlock Holmes, created by famed Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle. I have no response to that. And, really, it’s irrelevant. We borrowed steam technology from the British and they borrowed nuclear technology from us — it’s all a narrative of positive growth.)
What really chaps my hide (take that, Britain) is that House M.D. was a very good show, but the BBC took it and made it even better.
But seriously: I typically don’t like the Sherlock Holmes character. He comes from an era long before concepts like ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘chaos theory.’ He is a relic from a society that held to the idea of a man-made utopia and the Crystal Palace – when advances in the sciences and ‘modern’ technology led people to really believe that humanity was on the verge of answering all the important questions, and that eventually we would be able to know and comprehend pretty much everything. It all seems a bit silly now, but it was a real thing, trust me . . . or look it up.
Today we know that for every plausible explanation for why something happened there is an infinite number of increasingly implausible explanations. I’ve longed for a parody of Sherlock in which he deduces a very rational, logical, even brilliant hypothesis only to hear a completely alternate explanation. The man didn’t kill his wife – she fell down a well while walking late at night. He didn’t go looking for her because she went walking after a very heated fight, and he thought she went to her parents and wanted to give her time to cool off.
All that to say that I never thought I would like a show about Sherlock Holmes (unless he was played by Robert Downey Jr.). The flaw lies not in Sherlock as a character, but rather in the potential minefield of lazy writing tricks that he becomes. Need to place a character at the scene of a crime? Easy; create some red dust that only exists in one place in the world and that only Sherlock knows about. Then have some of that dust on the inside cuff of one of the suspect’s sleeves. It’s hard even for a good writer to avoid short-cuts, and it’s just too tempting for most. It’s akin to science fiction shows that create nonsense words at a climactic moment to solve a critical problem (hello, ‘antimatter inverter’ . . . but wouldn’t that just create . . . matter?).
But the BBC’s modernized re-framing of the world’s most famous detective works, and it makes me love the character.
Sherlock achieves greatness because the writing is great. Watching episode one of Sherlock: A Study in Pink, I found example after example of truly rational deductions that are, as Watson says, “incredible”—“brilliant.” After watching all six episodes on seasons one and two, I never felt cheated (well, almost never) by some last minute, convenient and incomprehensible deduction that seemed to solve all the problems.
As an added bonus, the interactions between Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) are some of the best examples of ‘buddy cop’ repartee since Bilbo talked to Smaug, oh wait . . . same actors. There is no question that their performances in this (at first) low-profile BBC drama were what propelled Cumberbatch and Freeman to the new level of stardom they now enjoy. And the first season’s patiently crafted introduction of Moriarty (played with a casual brilliance by an actor I refuse to name because . . . spoilers) builds a level of suspense for the archenemy that I feared could only end in an anti-climax. Instead, the denouement delivered a harrowing cliffhanger that probably had most people, like me, jumping straight into season two, if only to watch the first ten minutes.
When the series introduced Irene Adler (Lara Pulver), I noticed something which cannot be ignored in a review of what I consider to be the best adaptation yet of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Anybody who can compete on an intellectual level with Holmes must be superhuman in some way. If we want to be constantly impressed with the protagonist’s amazing mental powers he should be forced to battle characters with equally impressive powers. Maybe not mental powers; perhaps they have the power of seduction, or corporate planning, or a technical brilliance that makes it possible for them to build an arc reactor and a metal sui. . . hey . . . wait a minute!
Really, what we’re dealing with in Sherlock is just another superhero show. It’s a very good superhero show, and these are popular right now. They may not wear capes, carry big hammers, or wear tight fitting, black, leather, um . . . boots, but they still exist on a higher plane than all lesser mortals. This appeals to our desire to escape the ‘normal’ – a desire specifically stated when Sherlock and Watson discuss relationships.
Watson: People don’t have archenemies.
Sherlock: I’m sorry?
Watson: In real life. There are no archenemies in real life. Doesn’t happen.
Sherlock: Doesn’t it? Sounds a bit dull.
Watson: So, who did I meet?
Sherlock: What do real people have, then, in their . . . real lives?
Watson: Friends . . . people they know, people they like, people they don’t like. Girlfriends, boyfriends.
Sherlock: Yes, well, as I was saying. . . dull.
This taps into a fundamental fear many of us share – that we are going through the motions of living while missing out on the grand adventure of life. Go back several decades, and the grand adventure would more likely be sought in foreign countries, undiscovered jungles, military valor, or love affairs across the globe. Now it seems that we are reaching further afield, looking for a hidden or ethereal reality, invisible, right in front of our eyes. (But that is a whole other column altogether.)
The point is this: Sherlock gives us supermen, battling it out around London as we, represented by Watson, look on in amazement.
And yet, the best moments, the most real, interesting, and moving moments, come when we are reminded of Sherlock’s limitations and fears. We see how he suffers in other areas of life because his unique skill set comes at a cost. We find that Watson can actually rise to the occasion, in different ways but just as often. These revelations humanize the characters and make the whole show much more realistic (something they probably did copy from House M.D.).
Season three is already out on the BBC, and because we live in the wonderful age that we do, it’s also available online. Now we won’t have to wait five years for the show to be picked up on PBS, interrupted constantly by pop-culture relics like Ed Asner, The Smothers Brothers, and Vickie Lawrence threatening to pull the plug if they don’t get more money. So maybe we won’t have to worry anymore about who borrowed what from who, or whether or not Downton Abbey is a rip-off of Dallas, which was really a rip-off of The Duchess of Duke Street. What matters is that Mark Gatiss (holy smokes, it’s Mycroft!) and Steven Moffat, the creators/writers of the series, made a pure Sherlock Holmes, and they did it write (see what I did there?).
