Does Elementary Cut The Mustard?

Does Elementary Cut The Mustard?

Posted on Thursday September 27, 2012, 16:46 by Stephen Carty in Small Screen

If, like me, you can’t get enough of the BBC’s addictive-as-heroin Sherlock (seriously third season, hurry up), then you probably aren’t holding out much hope for CBS’s American interpretation of Arthur Conan Doyle's source material. Putting aside the brilliance of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ version for a moment, there’s also the little matter of Guy Ritchie’s big-screen interpretation, meaning that Elementary faced the potential problem of Arthur Conan Doyle fatigue. Take into account the poor track record of Americanisations of British shows, and things weren’t looking too good.

But all in all though, the pilot isn’t too bad. Undeniably, it plays like a fairly standard cop procedural and you get the feeling that future episodes will quickly move into the tried-and-tested case-of-the-week format, but it’s nowhere near the disaster many of us feared. While showrunner Rob Doherty’s script doesn’t offer up too many surprises (anyone who watches any of the 217 variations of CSI will have little trouble guessing the culprit), there’s enough here to keep me curious (for now) and interested in seeing the second episode.

Perhaps surprisingly, the main reason for this is Jonny Lee Miller. The surprise was not because I don’t rate him as an actor (I do), but because of how popular the other current interpretations are. While he’s not as compelling as Benedict Cumberbatch or as bankable as Robert Downey Jr., Miller somehow makes the role his own. Far less antisocial, alien and borderline sociopathic than Cumberbatch’s, Miller’s version is less of a limitlessly-intelligent super-deducer, yet this actually works in the show’s favour...

Okay, so this . makes him less special too, but it’s nice that this Holmes’ deductive reasoning is less far-fetched than the heightened detective work we see on Sherlock. Now, before you burn the internet down in protest, let me clarify that I love Moffat’s occasionally outlandish explanations (“Your phone is scratched – it must have been given to you by an alcoholic!”), but more believable explanations are a welcome change of pace. That said, when we meet Miller’s version (teensy-weensy spoiler ahead) he’s memorising TV dialogue. Sherlock Holmes? Really? Memorising TV dialogue? Given that there are several televisions on at once, he’s clearly trying to practice memory multi-tasking (or something), but doesn’t Sherlock ignore anything which is unrelated to the case at hand and, therefore, unimportant?

So what else is new? Well, most obviously, the sleuthing has been moved to New York. Here, Holmes (played by Miller, still best known as Sick Boy from Trainspotting) is a recovering drug addict who now lives in Manhattan after some problems in London. While deciding to return to work as a consulting detective for the NYPD (who accept him rather easily, I might add), he’s given a “sober companion” in the form of - yup you guessed it - his trusty partner-in-crime-detection Watson. Oh, but here’s the thing, this Watson is a woman

Unfortunately though, while the Watson-as-a-woman variation could’ve put a fresh spin on the enduring Holmes legend, here it feels very much like a gimmicky, box-ticking attempt at appealing more to a female demographic. Of course, it doesn’t help that Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson isn’t particularly interesting or likeable (fair play she’s hiding a traumatic past, but crack a smile!), replacing the usual bromance buddy with a spiky babysitter. With no visible signs of chemistry between the two, it’s a relief then that the producers have apparently promised that Elementary will not, under any circumstances, attempt a will-they-won’t-they romance between them. Let’s see if that’s still the case when ratings dwindle.

But what about you readers? Are you looking forward to CBS’ Americanisation of Conan Doyle’s classic? Or is moving the action to New York an elementary mistake? Regardless, the game’s afoot...