Elementary - Season One
CBS
3 out of 5 stars.
By Kemper
There are some mild
general spoilers to Elementary’s first season, but I have avoided giving away
any of the really juicy details.
How many filmed versions of Sherlock Holmes can one
generation watch?
It seems like someone is seriously trying to answer that
question. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law have been portraying Holmes and Watson
as steampunkish action heroes in a couple of movies by director Guy
Ritchie. The BBC’s critically acclaimed
Sherlock has Benedict Cumberbatch
playing the detective in modern London with Martin Freeman as his blogging
Doctor Watson. Holmes had even been
reinvented as a grumpy pill addicted doctor who solved medical mysteries
instead of crimes in Fox’s long running House
M.D.
Since CBS has been dominating the TV ratings in recent years
with a schedule filled with police procedurals, a series about one of the best
known fictional detectives of all time was a natural fit, but it also seemed like
it’d be a watered down version, if not an outright rip-off, of Sherlock. However, there’d be some differences between
the two like setting the show in America and giving Watson a sex-change
operation.
In Elementary, Sherlock
Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is a recovering drug addict who has moved from London
to New York. Holmes’ estranged and
wealthy father has hired a sober companion to keep Sherlock off the
needle. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) was a surgeon
who quit after she accidently killed a patient and became a live-in drug counselor who
moves into Holmes’ brownstone to help keep him clean. Holmes shows off his brilliant deduction
skills by solving crimes as a consulting detective for the NYPD’s Captain
Gregson (Aidan Quinn).
While the idea of a Watson being a sober companion was a
clever twist, the series didn’t seem like anything special in the early
episodes. Predictably, Holmes and Watson
clash with Sherlock resenting having a full-time baby-sitter, and Watson irritated
at his arrogance and eccentricities. The show seemed like many other CBS
procedurals that revolved around bizarre crimes with just enough red herrings
to temporarily throw Holmes off the scent, but he’d still always be able to
identify the criminal by the end of the episode.
While Miller was doing an interesting interpretation of
Holmes and the dynamic between him and Liu was fun, there wasn’t much else going
on to make Elementary stand out from
any other crime-of-the-week show. However,
as the season progressed and the show gained confidence, it steadily built up the character stories that added new layers to the show.
Over the course of the season we learned of the tragic
reason why Holmes took to drugs and left London. The revelations coming out of
this led to a much more likeable and sympathetic Sherlock than we usually
get. The foundation of this was Miller’s
performance. Rather than sticking to a
strict Arthur Conan Doyle original version like Cumberbatch brilliantly does by
playing Holmes as so arrogant and aloof so that he sees himself as above normal
human concerns, Miller’s Holmes has distinct touches of compassion and
empathy. His arrogance and insistence on
trying to look at everything logically is a mask he wears to conceal his own emotional
damage, and Miller deliberately lets the mask slip every now and then to let us
get a glimpse of the wounded person behind the brilliant detective image.
This particularly comes out in his interactions with
Watson. Rather than treating her as an
audience to applaud his brilliance, this Holmes genuinely respects Watson and
her opinions. For her part, Joan finds herself increasingly intrigued by Holmes
and his methods. When her time as his
sober companion ends fairly early in the season, Holmes offers to teach Watson
how to become a detective, and to her own amazement, she accepts. It feels like
the beginning of a partnership and while Holmes often delights in tormenting Watson
with his training methods, Joan is there as an equal, not someone to worship
and document Holmes’ accomplishments.
(The show’s producers have also been smart enough to keep their
relationship completely platonic with no hint of romantic tension. Knock wood that they keep thinking that way.)
This was steady improvement for a freshman show, but the
best came in the twelfth episode M.
Vinnie Jones portrayed a brutal serial killer that Holmes had failed to catch
in London with disastrous results. When
M. comes to New York and starts killing more people, Holmes goes off the deep
end on a mission of revenge without regard to the consequences, and we got to
see a very different and angry side of Sherlock. The fall out from this episode lingered over
the second half of the season and it set-up the terrific season finale in which
Holmes finally confronts his greatest enemy as well as a fair number of
personal demons.
So while Elementary’s
first season occasionally got bogged down in trying to come up with puzzling
crimes in stand-alone episodes that just weren’t that compelling, the
performances of Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu helped keep interest alive until
the show could introduce some serialized elements that tapped into Holmes lore
and put fresh new spins on them.
Hopefully the second season will continue that trend this fall.
