Sherlock Holmes





I recently gave in to my TV obsession and watched the BBC series Sherlock that my friends had been insisting I watch. Around the same time, I read a collection of the original Doyle books. After I finished the two relatively short seasons of Sherlock, I didn't want to wait a year or so until the new season came out. Desperate for more Holmes, I noticed a new series on CBS was coming out, Elementary, another modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Hoping for the best I watched the pilot. I was disappointed, but reminded myself that pilots are usually not very good. So last week, I gave it another try. I was again disappointed.
I'm the type of book/tv show/movie fan who doesn't mind minor changes from the canon material. I didn't mind that in Elementary  Watson is a woman. Or that it's set in New York, or that Watson isn't Sherlock's roommate but also his companion to help him fight his addiction to drugs (which does match the canon material).
What I did mind was the total change in Sherlock and Watson's characters. They just aren't the same people. In the books, and especially in Sherlock,  Sherlock is supposed to be basically a sociopath. He can't connect with anyone besides Watson,  he's arrogant, he's inconsiderate, he says things he really shouldn't and he doesn't have any particular reason for doing so besides the fact that that's who he is.
When you read the books, even when you watch Sherlock, you like Sherlock as a character, but you wouldn't really want to meet him as a person. He'd immediately know more about you than you'd want him to and would tell you everything he'd figured out.
 In Elementary they try to make this hero more likable, but wind up just making him an entirely different character. In the second episode, it is implied that he is conciously rude and arrogant to push people away, and he does so to punish himself for something. This gives Sherlock Holmes a sense of empathy that any reader of the original stories will not pick up. He also does not seem to have the same extremely uncanny ability to determine more about a person by some insanely minor detail. Elementary's Sherlock is still intellegent, but in a much more conventional way. While this makes him more realistic, it also makes him much less interesting.
They also change the character of Watson. In the stories, Watson is happy to help Sherlock and enjoys coming with him on interesting cases. Sherlock's Watson is much more like the book Watson, though he worries a bit more. He understands that Sherlock is liable to disappear for days, and respects his crime solving genius, even when it's paired with overwhelming arrogance.
Watson in Elementary is constantly worried about Sherlock, doesn't seem to actually like him, as the reader can easily tell Watson does in the stories, and doesn't seem to enjoy the cases she is taken on. Maybe she will grow to like him and the mysteries more, but so far, she doesn't seem to be the same character.
And to compare Elementary to Sherlock  is just unfair. Sherlock has more complex mysteries, like the first episode, (Spoilers ahead!) where the murderer is a taxi driver who is serial killing by convincing people to kill themselves. He almost convinces Sherlock to do so. Elementary has mysteries much less interesting. In the second episode, Holmes even tells the veiwer who did it in the first half, he just takes a long time to find out how. It's much less interesting, and the veiwer feels less like they missed information that, were they as smart as Sherlock would've allowed them to figure it out, and more like Sherlock just knows things he doesn't bother to share.
Altogether, I'd recommend the Arthur Conan Doyle books, and the excellent Sherlock series. But I would not recommend Elementary at the moment, though I'm not prepared to entirely write it off. It's still possible it will improve once the writers find their stride, but for now I can honestly say there's not much of a competition between the two Sherlocks.

Image Source: Sherlock Holmes
Correction: I accidentally said Sherlock is a PBS show, but it's actually a BBC show (Thanks Jasper).