Unsolicited Advice

One of the reasons I'm not immediately impressed with Elementary is that I feel it's missing an important element which has been an integral part of the Holmes/Watson relationship in all its successful forms. They're setting Holmes and Joan Watson up in this semi-adversarial bicker-yourselves-friends dynamic, which is lamentably common in television drama, and which I am sick to death of seeing. (They also seem to be setting her up to be the Woman Who Fixes Him, which annoys me more, but that's another rant altogether.) It seems to me that they have missed the point of why this particular relationship is famous. There is much snark about slash in Sherlock . Downey and Law are playing it up intentionally (in the words of one critic: "It's a decent yaoi fanfic.") in their films. What Doyle was actually writing between Holmes and Watson was a kind of relationship not much seen, or at least not much acknowledged today, what was known as a "romantic fri...

Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I have now seen the pilot for Elementary . Not. Impressed.

So the premiere of CBS' Elementary goes out tonight, and like Han Solo before me, I've got a bad feeling about this. I have no complaints about the cast. Nobody makes me cringe. Jonny Lee Miller is actually quite a respected thespian, if mostly unknown in America, and in fact was recently on stage with Benedict Cumberbatch, switching off the roles of the mad doctor and the Creature in Frankenstein . Lucy Liu gets a lot of undeserved crit, mostly for doing fluffy pop things, but she isn't a bad actress. I have not, however seen her in anything serious enough to evaluate whether she's a good enough actress to save a crap script, which I suspect is going to be the problem here. I have serious misgivings about the combination of "female Watson" and "American network television". I don't object to a female Watson per se ; in the Victorian originals, the constraints of military service and medical school meant that Watson pretty much had to be a w...