by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a Masterpiece Mystery showing on PBS of an episode in the intriguing but
ultimately unsatisfying BBC-TV updating of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock! These programs — they only film about three or four
per year — have generally got better reviews than the U.S. attempt to rework
Holmes in a modern-day setting, Elementary, but I simply don’t find them as entertaining and I suspect Charles
doesn’t, either. Both shows make Holmes a good deal more anti-social than he
was in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories — Conan Doyle was too much the
good Victorian to have Holmes openly outrage conventional morality (in last
night’s Sherlock!, “A Scandal in
Belgravia” — each Sherlock!
episode riffs off the canon for its title — he shows up naked, except for a
strategically placed bedsheet, for a meeting at the Royal Palace); Conan
Doyle’s Holmes, for all his fabled eccentricities, usually followed ordinary
norms and when he didn’t it wasn’t to be outrageous but simply because he got
too wrapped up in whatever he was thinking about at the moment to care.
Ironically, the Sherlock!
writers’ decision to come closer to the canon and use not only character names
but also (altered) titles and situations from Conan Doyle only makes their
stories more irritating when they do
diverge from the original.
“A Scandal in Belgravia,” like the Conan Doyle story
“A Scandal in Bohemia” from which it takes its title, centers around Irene
Adler (Lara Pulver), only in this version she’s not an opera singer but a
professional dominatrix who in the course of her employment has learned a lot
of government and corporate secrets and stores them all on a smartphone that
becomes the MacGuffin. Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), Watson (Martin Freeman)
and Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Mark Gattis, who doesn’t look at all like Benedict Cumberbatch, the series’ star, and
plays Mycroft considerably more prissily than I’d imagined him from Conan
Doyle’s original) get involved in a race for the smartphone that includes
agents of the CIA (no Anglo-American cooperation for these writers!) and others, including two characters named
Neilson (Todd Boyce) and Jeanette (Oona Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s
granddaughter) — an in-joke reference from writers Mark Gatiss and Steven
Moffat to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald? — that also involves the British
secret service loading up an airliner with dead people because they’ve received
word that terrorists are going to blow it up over the Atlantic and they don’t
want the terrorists to know they’re on to them but they also don’t want
still-living people to die when the bomb goes off — only the plane-of-the-dead
doesn’t fly after all because Holmes let the plan slip to Adler inadvertently when
he e-mailed or texted her.
Sherlock!
is engaging and generally does a good job of incorporating modern technology,
particularly modern communications (Watson’s tales of Holmes’ adventures are
published not in the Strand
magazine but on a blog) into the Holmes mythos, but it’s also frustrating and annoyingly
complicated plot-wise. Also, Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t my idea of a great
Holmes: he’s too short, too wimpy-looking — like a guy in his late 20’s you’d
see at a Gay bar still desperately trying to pass himself off as a twink — and
as annoying as Jonny Lee Miller sometimes gets on Elementary! he’s a much more authoritative performer and more
believable as Holmes. Elementary!
got criticized by Holmesians even before it aired for making Watson a woman —
but Miller and Lucy Liu have real chemistry together, which Cumberbatch and
Freeman don’t. (And whose dorky idea was it to have Holmes address Watson as
“John”? In the Conan Doyle stories he never used Watson’s first name!) Charles seemed a bit put
out that Gatiss and Moffat didn’t keep Irene Adler a singer — and it occurred
to me that even if they hadn’t wanted to make her an opera singer they could have had her be a Madonna-style entertainer who
plays sexual dominatrix both on stage as part of her act and off-stage for
real.
