#elementary

freckledhoney:

Where he goes, Angus follows.

Sherlock is back! Now why did it take so long?

It really shouldn’t take this long to cross an ocean. When the Concorde was still operational, it could go from London to New York in, what, three hours? But no, we American lowlifes just got the second series of BBC’s Sherlock last night, a full four months after the Brits did. Stupid Brits. In the age of instant Internet communication, why did it take this long?

Its a shame, because there is something about the Sherlock Holmes character that is just naturally appealing to us rebellious Yanks as well as our Corgi enthusiast friends. The character is brash, cold, ill-mannered and arrogant - a terrific amalgam of all the stereotypical worst traits of British and American cultures. Yet he’s also brilliant, funny and oddly charming - a great way of showing that what people hated about these respective former and present world superpowers can also make them great.

So Sherlock is a natural bridge character between our two nations, much like James Bond and Batman. Which makes it all the more ridiculous and possibly selfish that America keeps trying to wrestle Sherlock away from London’s Baker Street.

We started off fine enough, with Bryan Singer’s loose reimagination of Sherlock Holmes in the medical drama House. The character of Gregory House was lifted straight out of Sherlock Holmes lore - not necessarily the original lore, but the lore as it had evolved over the past 100 years. He is a brilliant obnoxious curmudgeon obsessed with mysteries, one who suffered from the twin maladies of addiction and a limp. He was even played by the exceedingly British Hugh Laurie, albeit with an American accent. However, the series has featured diminishing returns for several years now, as its medical mystery formula wore thin quickly and never received any jolt of variation.

But it just got worse from there. Holmes’ most recent foray into film, the Guy Ritchie-directed, Robert Downey Jr. starring Sherlock Holmes, took the aspects of the Sherlock Holmes mythology that fit best with the staples of American tentpoles and amped them up to eleven, with impressive box office results. Less impressive was its dedication to character. The only difference between Downey Jr.’s performance as Sherlock Holmes and his performance as Tony Stark were a change in costume and a British accent (That accent seems to just be Downey deepening his voice and huffing a lot). Meanwhile, you have Jude Law’s humorless Dr. Watson, who never reveals any reason why he and Holmes are friends. As for Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler, she is so overmatched by Downey Jr. in personality that it’s hard to believe she could ever be a match for him in terms of cunning and strategy.

Final nail? CBS is raring to go with the fall procedural Elementary, which drops Sherlock Holmes in modern day New York (because London is just far too exotic for American audiences), with Lucy Liu playing Watson. Yes, you read that correctly. Not only is this effectively a complete ripoff of Sherlock, but Watson is played by Lucy Fucking Liu.

So in a roundabout way, I guess that answers my original question. Considering the BBC’s Sherlock is really the only adaptation in recent years that has gotten to the heart of what makes Holmes, Watson and company so compelling, maybe the Brits just feel a need to protect it from our corrupting American influence. And considering they now have control of Abraham Lincoln, we should probably let them hold on to Sherlock as much as they want, for fear of any vicious reprisal.