Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson and Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes travel to London in the Season Two premiere of Elementary, tonight at 10 Eastern, 9 Central on CBS.
Like all true fans of Sherlock Holmes, I’m impatiently waiting for the return of Sherlock. Not happening for a few months yet.
Tonight, though, CBS’ Elementary begins its second season with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Holmes and Watson and I’m looking forward to that. It’ll be a nice filler until the real updated Holmes and Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, return.
You might remember I was less than enthusiastic about Elementary last season. I felt that its Holmes, while Miller looks exactly like my ideal Sherlock, wasn’t active and adventurous enough, and that the show’s writers had no idea what to do with Watson and were wasting Lucy Liu in the part. Both things changed in the last five or six episodes. Miller’s Holmes is still not the swashbuckler Cumberbatch’s is, but he’s gotten more dangerous and Liu’s Watson, while still too much of a junior detective to Holmes and not enough of the independent grown up the rea'l---that is Conan Doyle’s---Watson is or as simultaneously funny and deadly serious as Freeman’s Watson, has been given more to do and, more importantly, more to say that isn’t a string of self-help cliches and contemporary versions of “Oh, I say, Holmes, how the deuce did you deduce that one?”
At any rate, I’m liking the show more and more and I’m not just saying that because the great Wev McEwan has threatened to kick me in the shins if I don’t agree with her that it is the best TV show ever.
Tonight, Holmes and Watson go to London where they meet [possible spoiler redacted] who’s played by [possible spoiler redacted], a nifty piece of casting against type of which I heartily approve.
Below, are my two posts from February when I was just getting into the show and wishing it was more like what it’s subsequently grown to be. A third post, this one on not just Elementary’s but Sherlock’s, Robert Downey Jr’s, and Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler is in the works.
Scroll down or click on the links:
Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes.
Elementary, my dear Watson, if that, indeed, is who you are!
I hated the England episode --- Mycroft is a fixed point in the SH universe, with some minimal requirements. The episode violated all of those requirements. Still, I enjoyed the episode, at the same time as hating it, as a bog-standard US mystery, which is how I have continued to regard the show.
Tonight set another new low. As a math professor, someone who knows something about the P=NP problem the episode is based around, I was cringing every other minute. I love the fact that a TV show chooses to focus on math (as indeed the show Numb3rs used to do) --- I just hate it when they get things very very wrong (as this episode did, and as did many episodes of Numb3rs).
Overall, I think that there is huge benefit to the math community that shows focus this way (even with their mistakes). But my goodness, it is hard to support a lie!
Posted by: Neil | Friday, October 04, 2013 at 12:19 AM
Neil, I couldn't believe what they left out about Mycroft either, but he's supposed to be coming back as a semi-regular so maybe they're saving it up. The show has a better appreciation for Conan Doyle's Holmes stories than I first gave it credit for. The producers like to deliver things in spoonfuls.
I haven't watched the last couple of episodes yet. I was surprised they had a math plot so soon after introducing their Moriarty, who is not a mathematics professor by any means.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Monday, October 07, 2013 at 01:17 PM