Inhalt

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Sherlock - The Television Companion

by Jack Barrett

Contents

Introduction - The Game is On!

Season One

Season Two

Season Three

Christmas Special - The Abominable Bride

Season Four

If You Liked Sherlock You Should Watch

Will Sherlock Return?

INTRODUCTION - THE GAME IS ON!

Believe it or not, Sherlock was not considered to be a sure thing at its inception. The original version (which apparently cost £800,000) of A Study in Pink was canned by the BBC and they decided to reshoot the entire episode. When word of this got out it led to whispers that the BBC thought they had a dud on their hands and were doing some damage control. Media onlookers assumed this was rather like the television version of unhappy movie studios deciding to reshoot large chunks of a film they have just made because they didn't think the end product was very good.

The whispers regarding Sherlock were very mistaken though. The BBC were not reshooting A Study in Pink because they thought they had a dud on their hands. The complete opposite was the actual truth. The BBC were reshooting A Study in Pink because they wanted Sherlock's episodes to be ninety minutes long instead of an hour. They also wanted to improve the production values - a move which suggested nothing but confidence in Sherlock. The BBC sensed that Sherlock had the potential to be a big hit so they wanted to go the extra mile and make the show as good as it could possibly be. Appropriately enough for a feature length show (albeit with only three episodes per season), the new and improved Sherlock was impressively cinematic and slick when it finally hit the small screen.

You might even say that Sherlock caught everyone by surprise when it was first transmitted. No one had really expected it to be this good or find such a big audience. And yet, there was no reason why there should have been too much doubt at all about the appeal of Sherlock. The creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are not exactly short of work nor the sort of people willing to put their name to any old rubbish. Sherlock was plainly a labour of love for both of them and something they'd put an awful lot of time and effort into planning. The huge success and popularity of Sherlock was beyond what was expected but there never anything less than confidence in the product.

Perhaps the doubt about the prospects for Sherlock came from the public domain status of the character. There have been so many film and television adaptations of Sherlock Holmes you could be forgiven for losing track of them. Some feared we might have reached a point of Sherlock Holmes saturation where there was little left to do with the character that was new or novel. There has been a Russian Sherlock, comedy spoofs, cheapo Canadian television Sherlock Holmes movies, Sherlock Holmes inspired characters like Hugh Laurie in House, about a gazillion adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and millions of other Holmes productions. Everyone from Roger Moore to Christopher Lee has played Sherlock Holmes. Playing Sherlock Holmes is rather like playing Hamlet. Actors have played the role before you and actors will play the role after you.

You could then forgive the general public a certain degree of Sherlock Holmes fatigue upon hearing that the BBC were making a new series featuring the great detective. The prospect of a new Sherlock Holmes show was hardly the most exciting prospect at first glance. Most people have read the books and watched far too many Sherlock Holmes films and TV shows. It was hard to see how the new show could anything that hadn't been done before.

For many, the last word in Sherlock Holmes television shows is the 1980s Granada series with Jeremy Brett. This show is still the ultimate comfort television. It is cosily Victorian with handsome production values and impressive period details. The show was also quite faithful to the literary source. For people of a certain age, Sherlock Holmes will probably always be Jeremy Brett. Brett's tightly wound, theatrical, somewhat camp, dramatic, and highly entertaining portrayal of Holmes was always compelling. If you are going to do a faithful period adaptation of the Conan Doyle books then the Granada series is hard to beat.

The clever thing about the concept of Moffat and Gatiss though is that they had no intention of treading on the hallowed turf of the Granada show. Their inspiration was not Jeremy Brett at all but Basil Rathbone. Moffat and Gatiss had a particular fondness for the films where Rathbone's Holmes was taken out of his period trappings and placed in the present day (the 1940s in this case) to battle Nazis during the war. Moffat and Gatiss thought this was fun and the sort of thing that more Sherlock Holmes adaptations should have done. They felt this would make the character seem more relevant and more relatable. They loved the idea of depicting a Sherlock Holmes who lived in the modern world.

Take James Bond for example. James Bond is a Cold War character in the Ian Fleming books. He is a product of the 1950s. The big bad of the Bond books is often the Soviet Union. However, in the James Bond films Bond is always in the present day. The Cold War has long gone. Fashions change, technology changes, but Bond is still more or less Bond - only in the present rather than the 1950s.

The concept of Moffat and Gatiss then was similar to James Bond. What would Sherlock Holmes be like if he lived in the London of 2010? Well, he'd use modern technology and dress differently, but nothing substantial would change. He'd still be Sherlock Holmes. There would still be crimes, mysteries, and murders to solve. The core qualities of the character, his eccentricity and brilliance, would still be in place. The decision by Moffat and Gatiss to set their version of Sherlock Holmes in the present day gave this show a freshness and novelty that set it apart from the countless other productions featuring the great detective. It was something different and people embraced that.

In (fairly) recent years the BBC had made two handsome Sherlock Holmes films featuring Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett as Holmes respectively. However, neither of these productions created much buzz or lodged in the memory. They were both period pieces and felt too familiar * to what had gone before and so didn't stand out from the crowd. The modern Sherlock show by Moffat and Gattis did stand out though. It almost immediately became a big domestic hit with positive critical reviews. It also proved popular in international markets. The modern setting was clearly appealing for a number of casual viewers who might not ordinarily have watched a Sherlock Holmes film or TV adaptation.

The show soon attracted a passionate and devoted fanbase. What was the appeal of Sherlock? Why was it so successful? Well, aside from the novelty of a modern setting, a salient factor in the appeal of Sherlock was humour. Sherlock is a witty show. Steven Moffat has noted how many Sherlock Holmes adaptations are rather stuffy and heritage. They sometimes take themselves too seriously and forget that the Conan Doyle books were witty and often amusing. Moffat is a witty writer himself (see how drab, flat, and unfunny Chris Chibnall's writing on Doctor Who is compared to the days when Moffat was the showrunner) and so Sherlock has plenty of wit and humour.

Another obvious factor in the success of Sherlock is Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict Cumberbatch was the only person who auditioned for the lead role in Sherlock. They didn't bother to look at anyone else because they knew Cumberbatch was perfect. Moffat and Gatiss had seen the actor in the film Atonement and were desperate to cast him. At the time, despite already having a decent number of stage and screen appearances under his belt, not many people knew who Benedict Cumberbatch was. That all changed when Sherlock came out. The show catapulted Benedict Cumberbatch to stardom and he is now a film star and leading man. In fact, one of the biggest obstacles of ever making Sherlock again in the future would be finding a time when Benedict Cumberbatch was actually available.

The chemistry between the two leads is also an important component in the success of Sherlock and so much credit has to go to Martin Freeman. While the producers only had eyes on Cumberbatch for the part of Sherlock this was not the case with Watson. Several actors tested for the part of Watson. These included, as most Sherlock fans will know, Matt Smith. Smith was deemed too eccentric to be a good foil for Cumberbatch but Moffat clearly took note of Smith because he cast him as Doctor Who. Smith seemed more like Sherlock Holmes than Dr Watson. In the end the producers settled on Martin Freeman as Watson and one can see why in the show. Freeman makes John Watson a down to earth likeable everyman. He is the perfect deadpan foil for Sherlock.

The format of Sherlock (which one could describe as three 90 minute episodes once in a blue moon) was both a strength and a weakness (for reasons which we'll talk more about in the book that follows). It was definitely a strength that Sherlock was rationed. This meant that we never grew weary or bored of the show. We were always left wanting more than we actually got. There was, on the flip side, unavoidably a frustration in this. Fans had to wait ages for new episodes. Because there were so few episodes of Sherlock (relative to other TV shows) the new episodes, when they arrived, had a lot of expectation and anticipation. They were judged very harshly in the end if they were not deemed to be brilliant. You can't help feeling that Sherlock should at the very least have had a few more special episodes.

What ultimately made producing new episodes of Sherlock such a complex task was not enthusiasm or willingness but availability. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are two of the busiest actors on the planet. It's difficult to get them both together now. Moffat and Gatiss seem to be ambiguous about whether Sherlock will ever return again one day. They both seem happy with what they did on the show and are relaxed about it possibly never returning. They stress though that the door is never closed. Later on in the book we will take a closer and more detailed look at the chances of more Sherlock episodes in the future.

You might say that, ultimately, Sherlock was a victim of its own success. It was wildly praised at first and became a huge success. However, because of its high profile and the fact that you didn't get many episodes it was eventually scrutinised out of all human proportion. At some point it suddenly became quite trendy to go against the grain and say Sherlock was overrated. It is true that later episodes of Sherlock struggled to match the very high bar set by the first two seasons. The criticism did go over the top in the end though. Some feel that Sherlock jumped the shark when Mary joined the fray and was given an elaborate and outlandish backstory where she was revealed to be a deadly assassin.

A number of fans felt that Sherlock became too bogged down in personal drama when they simply wanted more of Sherlock and John solving mysterious cases. We will look at some of these criticisms when we discuss the individual episodes and see how much validity they have. So, let's settle back and take a whirl through the highs and lows of Sherlock. I will offer some of my own personal criticisms of the episodes that follow but I will of course offer a lot of praise too because I think Sherlock, at its best, was a terrific show and one that I certainly hope we haven't seen the last of.

* In mitigation, you might argue that Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silk Stocking did actually try to be somewhat different. Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silk Stocking is a television film first broadcast over Christmas in 2004. It was directed by Simon Cellan Jones and written by Alan Cubitt - who also wrote the Richard Roxburgh Hound of the Baskervilles. Roxburgh is replaced by Rupert Everett in the lead role although Ian Hart returns as Dr Watson.

The updated Hound of the Baskervilles suffered from its self-consciously postmodern approach and rather loose attitude to the source material but Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silk Stocking actually ups the ante as far prodding Conan Doyle traditionalists and waiting for a reaction is concerned. This is a completely original screenplay that has nothing to do with Conan Doyle's work (save for a few lines and references here and there) and is set in 1902. More than anything it seems to be inspired by films like SE7EN and The Silence of the Lambs (maybe a tiny splash of Hitchcock's Frenzy too) and CSI style police thrillers with their modern profiling techniques and procedures.

It was a relatively brave attempt to do something slightly new but I can't say I was terribly impressed by the end result. It appears as if they were determined - perhaps with an eye to the American market - to make this less stuffy and heritage than previous Holmes films, more risqué even, but it makes Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silk Stocking too generic for its own good at times. The film begins with the discovery of the body of a young woman washed-up by the Thames. Dr Watson (who seems to be working for the police) is present at the post-mortem and observes the victim was strangled with a silk stocking that remains knotted around her neck.

The attending physician, Dr Dunwoody (Nicholas Pallise), believes that the victim is merely a street prostitute who had an unfortunate encounter with a dodgy kinky client and was dumped in the river after a sex game went wrong but Watson is not convinced by this theory. He decides to seek out his old colleague Sherlock Holmes, who is now practically retired and increasingly opium addled. Holmes is not pleased to see Watson but after a few sarcastic bon mots is eventually persuaded to look into the case and determines that a serial killer is on the loose and that the victims are from high society and not prostitutes. The game is afoot yet again.

Rupert Everett is a decent shout for Sherlock Holmes on the face of it. He's tall and dark and looks as if he's just stepped out of another century. He appears much younger than most of the actors who have played the part before him too and so is more in line with the age of Conan Doyle's Holmes. However, his performance is so languid, his delivery of his lines so sedated, that he comes across as bored more than anything and doesn't supply much in the way of charisma.

Sure, this was probably partly deliberate to stress the innate boredom of the character, his weariness at being so much clever than anyone else but rarely having a challenge worthy of him, but Everett is so one-note you get bored of his Holmes in the end and yearn for a bit more spark or eccentricity from his performance. He's always an interesting presence to look at with his aquiline features but he sounds too modern. You never really get a sense that this Holmes is a great genius either. Everett just comes across as a clever and rather smug public schoolboy rather than the world's greatest detective. He's not bad by any stretch of the imagination but it's hardly the most memorable interpretation of Holmes.

Ian Hart is better here as Watson than he was in The Hound of the Baskervilles - most notably because he radiates a bit more warmth and seems to care about Holmes more than he did in the Richard Roxburgh film. Neither Everett or Hart look completely convincing in period clobber and Holmes is completely antagonistic to Watson at the start of the film. You wonder why Watson would even be friends or put up with this Holmes. The story is a fairly run of the mill serial killer hunt that you feel like you've already seen countless times in contemporary police thrillers and is consequently rather disappointing.

It is unavoidably rather jarring too to see Holmes in a case involving a foot fetishist and being forced to endure a lecture from (and this is a complete invention on the part of Cubitt) Watson's American feminist psychiatrist wife to be Jenny Vandeleur (Helen McCrory) on the sexual motivations of serial killers. She even gives him a book called Psychopathia Sexualis which he uses to help him in the case. Somehow you can't imagine Jeremy Brett's Holmes sitting through this lecture or needing a nudge from Watson's fiancée to help him solve a case. It makes Holmes look a bit stupid to be honest.

Besides inventing an irritating fiancée for Watson, the treatment of Holmes' drug habit is also hardly faithful to the literary character. In the books Holmes would use cocaine as a last resort when he was without a case and suffering from acute boredom. Here he not only shoots up cocaine but seems to be an opium addict. It's a wonder he can even remember his own name let alone solve a case. The film is well produced and the costumes are nice but this film just sort of washed over me in the end. Everett has a few good moments when he becomes more commanding and some decent lines here and there ("The reek of the slaughterhouse - Eau de Morgue," he says when Watson asks how he knew he was following him near the start).

Oh, I liked too his response to Mrs Hudson (Anne Caroll) when asked when he wants his dinner. "7:30 ... the day after tomorrow." Ultimately though it all felt strangely one-paced and generic to me and suffers too now in comparison to Benedict Cumberbatch's performance in the slick modern day Sherlock series. On a side note also, I think they really overdid the fog machine. London looks like it's in the aftermath of a nuclear war. There was probably the potential here for a decent new Sherlock Holmes story but, sadly, I never liked this nearly as much as I wanted to. Watch out by the way for an appearance by the now ubiquitous Michael Fassbender in a supporting role.

SEASON ONE (2010)

A STUDY IN PINK

A Study in Pink was directed by Paul McGuigan and written by Steven Moffat. The story is loosely based on Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. The police are puzzled by a series of deaths. The link is a series of people who all appear to have committed suicide by taking a poisonous pill. They bring in consultant detective Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock deduces that a serial killer is the culprit. Sherlock is introduced to John Watson, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan, and the pair move into a flat in Baker Street. John slowly gets to know and trust Sherlock despite police officer Sally Donovan (Vinette Robinson) warning him that Holmes is a psychopath and will one day be responsible for murder. Sherlock's brother Mycroft (Mark Gatiss) keeps his identity hidden and asks John if he'll spy on Sherlock but John refuses. As these various events pan out, the killer is revealed...

A Study in Pink makes for a very solid introduction to the series and leaves the viewer eager to see more of this new modern incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. At first glance having Sherlock Holmes in the present day feels slightly too gimmicky and high concept - something that won't have the satisfying Sherlockian glow of something like the Granada series with Jeremy Brett. But maybe that's the point. You can't really beat the Jeremy Brett series at its own game but you can do something different with the character. Once we become accustomed to the contemporary setting it actually becomes a strength rather than a weakness and it's highly enjoyable to see Sherlock Holmes at work in the present day. And make no mistake, despite the updated setting, this is still 100% Sherlock Holmes.

If we make a comparison with Elementary, a perfectly competent (if unexciting) series which also features Sherlock Holmes in the present day (in New York in this case), Johnny Lee Miller's version of Sherlock Holmes at no point actually feels like Sherlock Holmes! He's simply a very shrewd detective who just happens to have the name Sherlock Holmes. Miller doesn't even look like Sherlock Holmes. Benedict Cumberbatch on the other hand IS Sherlock Holmes right down to the cuffs of his Belstaff coat. The producers claim that Benedict Cumberbatch was the only person they looked at when they were casting Sherlock Holmes and after watching the first episode we can believe them.

Cumberbatch, with his anachronistic aura and voice, lanky frame, and long curly hair, is exactly as one would imagine a youngish Sherlock Holmes would look. Cumberbatch seems as if he has wandered in from another era but still feels contemporary. He truly is a man in and out of his time. The concept for this younger than usual incarnation of Sherlock (who of course exists in the present day rather than Victorian London) is that he has yet to become the familiar Sherlock Holmes we are used to in most adaptations and versions of Conan Doyle's work. The sometimes stern and cranky but essentially decent, even warm(ish) elder man of Baker Street. You might even say that the Sherlock TV show is a prequel of sorts.

The Holmes we meet in A Study in Pink doesn't have much warmth but that's clearly a deliberate tactic early on. Later we will see more humanity in this character. The journey of Sherlock through the series is designed to make him more human and slightly less unemotional. He must understand the value of friendship and the importance of treating others with respect. It's not a challenge he will ever find easy but to be the true Sherlock Holmes of legend he must navigate a path of discovery. Here though Cumberbatch's Sherlock is aloof and superior to the point of being downright rude. But does he even realise he's being rude to anyone? Probably not. The rudeness of Sherlock is mitigated by him being funny as he ventures forth with sarcastic insults at anyone in the vicinity. A big part of the humour in Sherlock comes from the detective being incredibly rude to everyone in an expansive and erudite way.

What this series does capture nicely is Sherlock Holmes' impatience with anyone not on his intellectual level. He is a brilliant consulting detective and considered to be rather odd by the police - despite the fact that they often seem to require his assistance on knotty puzzling cases. "You know why he's here? He's not paid or anything. He likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. And you know what? One day just showing up won't be enough. One day we'll be standing round a body, and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there." This early theme of the police being rather weirded out by Sherlock was quickly phased out and the focus on Sherlock's relationship to the police became more centred on Lestrade - played as a kind hearted and decent copper by Rupert Graves.

Although he can never quite remember what Lestrade's first name is we see that Sherlock comes to regard Lestrade

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Bildmaterialien: https://pixabay.com/vectors/sherlock-sherlock-holmes-holmes-3828991/
Cover: Pixabay/AdventureTravelTrip
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.02.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-7577-5

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