Postmodern Sherlock
Okay, one more eccentric variation on Sherlock Holmes (and it surely won't be the last).
A new series, simply titled Sherlock, was launched for British TV and shown abroad in 2010. Rumour is that it will continue in subsequent years and at this time of writing we are waiting for the second season to launch.
Two major things are very different about it.
One, it takes place in today's London and involves a lot of current tech—cell phones, computers, DNA testing—as crucial ingredients of the stories. This might seem to antiquate a lot of Holmes's special talents, but he still sniffs out the varieties of mud, tobacco and so on.
And he still plays his party trick of detecting everything about people by noting tiny details of their appearance and behaviour. Remember, Sherlock Holmes is the original CSI-style sleuth.
The
second different thing about Sherlock is that
this detective isn't just eccentric, as eccentric actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays him.
He's practically a sociopath. Even calls himself one. He's a sociopath with Asperger syndrome, which is to say, a highly functioning, brilliant misfit.
Yet somehow, after an episode or two to get used to this weirdo, we warm up to him. This may have something to do with his Watson, played by Martin Freeman as everyman. He's a doctor still, but a veteran of the most recent post-9/11 war in Afghanistan rather than of the Angolo-Afghan war of 1878–80 like Doyle's original.
In the first episode, cutely titled "A Study in Pink", Watson meets Holmes in a manner similar to that in the first Sherlock Holmes story "A Study in Scarlet" and he gradually comes to appreciate his strange new friend, as in that original story. The televised episode goes off in some very different directions, but always finding modern parallels for Doyle's story. A hack driver, for example, is a taxi cabbie.
The second and third episodes are each updated amalgams of several original stories.
Mycroft is a powerful, somewhat ominous presence in the background of this series. We're never quite sure if he's looking out for Sherlock or working on the other side. It's to be seen how he's going to be developed as the series continues.
The same can be said about the entire show. At the time of writing, three more episodes, including "The Hounds of Baskerville" (yes, the plural is intended), are planned for 2012. How is that one in particular going to be turned into a contemporary tale?
After all the versions of the standard Sherlock Holmes story we've been exposed to, not knowing is kind of exciting.
— Eric
