Elementary

Yeah, it didn't really feel like a Sherlock Holmes story. Sherlock is better.

I enjoyed it, but I hope they make it more distinct and less of a procedural show.

edited 28th Sep '12 6:21:42 AM by Accela

I liked it, I think I liked it a bit more than Sherlock. I'll probably watch at least a few more times.

I was thinking a similar thing, even if I couldn't recall her name right off the top of my head.

I like that they made Sherlock a person with issues, not just Batman without gadgets. And that Watson can call him out on his crap. That's refreshing.

Just finished watching the pilot. I like that it's focus demonstrates Holmes as someone brilliant but tormented. Reminds me of Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal in the Sherlock Holmes movie, only less quirky.

Okay, putting the character stuff aside for a minute, did anyone else here feel that the quality of Sherlock-Holmes-style deduction in the pilot was just really, shamefully poor? I couldn't get past it, and just kept thinking this new Sherlock isn't very bright.

I mean, as an example: Holmes knows Watson used to be a surgeon because her hands are soft and smell like beeswax. I don't care if surgeons use beeswax to keep their hands soft; that's a completely common ingredient in hand lotion and wearing hand lotion is not exclusive to surgeons. It's not even a remotely statistically-likely explanation for it — most people with soft hands that smell like beeswax are not surgeons, even in medical-related industries, I'd assume. It's just not convincing at all.

I admit that there's room for a handful of weak deductions in a Sherlock Holmes adaptation — there's never enough screentime to explain everything he's thinking, so it's fine if they want to throw in a few odd or unexplained deductions once I'm convinced the guy is bright, but I thought his Sherlock Holmes-ness was entirely an informedAttribute here. Lots and lots of his deductions took the form of "here's one thing it could be, therefore, that's what it is". Also, at one point an entire suspect is dismissed with no more explanation that "his body language says to me he doesn't have the confidence to kill someone". Without giving an example of the body language or explaining how that works. This was the best they could do in the pilot?

There was that prediction at the end with the baseball game. And it was good how he went from a few critical facts to a whole string of conclusions about the end of Watson's career as a surgeon.

And with making Watson more of an investigator, the show is inviting you to join them in figuring out the villain. The intent here isn't to wow you, it's to draw you in so you can experience the thrill of figuring it out with the characters.

Just watched the first episode. Twice in a row. In my opinion, it was freaking masterful. Sherlock was The Remake, but Elementary was The ReTool, and a lot of the changes were real improvements.

First, Elementary!Sherlock is an ass, rather than an asshole. He doesn't sneer at people for not being as sharp as he is, he just rides roughshod over them because he both (a) believes himself (with, admittedly, some cause) to be smarter than they are and therefore that they need to listen to him, not vice-versa and (b) has a short temper, which leads him to act impulsively and counterproductively. The character is both more sympathetic and more realistic that way.

Second, Elementary!Watson is a better investigator than other versions, including the Sherlock Watson. Even ignoring the conversation before the bail hearing, she shows that both when she interrogates the first victim and when she notices the rice allergy. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm betting that this Watson is going to be a strong asset for this Sherlock in a real way.

Third, that word "real". This show is straight-up more realistic — not Raymond Chandler realistic, maybe, but Dorothy Sayers or Edgar Allan Poe at the minimum. Excepting the beeswax thing, Sherlock's observations seem a lot more like what a merely preternaturally-observant human being could accomplish than the reading-the-author's-notes detective work that Doyle was prone to, and I, for one, could understand the entirety of the crime and why it might have worked.

And this isn't anything to do with remake-vs-retool, but watch the episode more than once. Pretty near everything on camera binds together into one consistent whole. Knowing the whole story as you do, watch people's reactions, think about their plans, think about how they succeed and how they fail - there's some minor flaws due to (probably) budgetary or time constraints, but all the main characters are acting exactly according to what they should know. (For example: when Sherlock asked for a list of tall people, the husband point Sherlock at the doctor - who, being of a similar build to the real killer and having what could be vaguely construed as a motive, was a plausible suspect to distract the cops with. Another example: you could see in his face that Sherlock was full of it when he took credit for Watson turning his temper tantrum into a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine.)

First episodes aren't reliable barometers of future performance, but indications are good.

edited 28th Sep '12 1:25:41 PM by RobinZimm

I liked it. Not much more to say, really.

The fact that Holmes got from "you were parked in the neighborhood where there's a cemetery was where poor people are buried" to "you could only be visiting a patient you accidentally killed on the operating table" is, IMO, garbage. She can't have ever in her life had a friend who wasn't affluent? She can't have known anyone who died poor, say, because of drugs, despite being a professional drug councilor?

And that's only if you're willing to accept that this parking ticket conveniently fell out her purse at the right moment which basically states that she was in the neighborhood of this particular poorman's cemetery absolutely nothing else of interest. It sounds impressive enough when he's explaining it quickly, but most of the deducing was all but done for him by contrived coincidence. It might as well have been the script that fell out of her pocket.

It's not really that I need all of the deductions to be dazzlingly impressive (although frankly, I find it extremely cool when someone can pull off that sort of writing, and it helps me to believe in this character who's supposed to be brilliant if he actually, well, is.) What I do think matters is whether or not the deductions are legitimately logical. The beeswax thing isn't. The parking ticket thing isn't. The thing where he claims someone couldn't be the killer because their body language was submissive.... isn't. The fact that Holmes swears up and down that the victim MUST still be in the house because she was heavily bleeding from the cut she sustained from the glass when there's no blood at all in the bedroom where she struggled with the killer AFTER she was cut AFTER running up the stairs... isn't. I could keep going.

edited 28th Sep '12 5:47:41 PM by Bailey

I can get behind a realistic Holmes. The character has gotten a bit lost in his own mythology, not to mention the heavy-hitters like Moriarty, Adler, the hound, etc.

However, this series will have to work harder to distinguish itself. Sherlock has an artistry to it. Elementary is another quirky detective show. So the realistic approach is double-edged.

Well, if they take Holmes' mental issues seriously, it could be a nicely dramatic plotline.

The murder plot was completely baroque. Excessively so - I would have been fine with it if the spouse had put together this entire gambit to avoid getting his hands dirty - That would have been reasonable characterization. But then he goes and murders his fall guy? Not even a poison tablet in his medication, but just straight up violence? .. Say, what? Hoping that does not become a trend, because once? I can just chalk that up to "Crazy ass murderer", but if all their mysteries make this little sense from the perspective of the criminal, that is not a fair mystery, and bad writing.

I don't know if I buy that this version of Holmes is more "realistic" than most. Or that even it makes sense to attempt to make him more realistic by dialing down his deductive superpowers.

I mean, if you take a more realistic approach to Holmes's abilities in the modern area, it quickly becomes improbable that he's so much better at what he does than entire police forces. In the original stories, Holmes was brilliant, but also a rationalist and a forensic scientist in an era when forensic science was in its infancy. It's easy enough to believe he'd be better than a whole team of Lestrade's best men when Lestrade's best men could plausibly be ignoring footprints and fingerprints and Holmes is probably the only person in London looking at evidence under a microscope. Today, in order to make Holmes at all plausible as an independent investigator who the police so desperately need, you pretty much need to make him some sort of genius-savant, and you also need cases that call for a genius-savant.

I didn't see much of that in Elementary. Mostly I saw him coming to the sort of conclusions that we expect trained investigators to be able to make. Granted, the expectations of most audiences are a bit inflated by familiarity with CSI-type shows, where the trained professionals are better than they are in real life and there's always endless forensic evidence to prove everything conclusively... but still. A show about the police being less competent than we expect and one guy coming in and showing them up by doing what's in their job description in the first place is not really Sherlock Holmes anymore.

@Izeinspring: The florist was on the list of tall people that Holmes asked Mantlo for. He had to be. And Mantlo had good reason to believe that the florist would have confessed if he were alive when the police met him.

That's why he lied about that doctor flirting with his wife — the doctor was a Red Herring set out so as to give Mantlo time to eliminate the florist.

^ Wouldn't it have been easier to just NOT give Sherlock Holmes the name of his florist when he was asked for "tall people in his life"? I wouldn't immediately think of the flower delivery guy when asked about people "in my life".

I mean, the omission might have been suspicious if the police investigated further and found out the wife had been receiving a ridiculous number of flower deliveries. But he's screwed anyway if they figure that out because: he's got a documented connection to the flower delivery guy, the flower delivery guy has a criminal record that involves killing redheads who looked like the wife, and the flower delivery guy's criminal and medical records would make it clear the husband knew about the redhead-killing. And there's all the surgery, which ought to have been on the medical records, too, but that's just a bonus, really. Nevermind that he actually SENT them to a doctor who knew about the surgery and apparently was pretty vocal in his objections to the husband pressuring her into it

edited 30th Sep '12 7:47:55 PM by Bailey

well, it's only documented if he didn't pay for them in cash. or maybe he had the flowers delivered as payment for his services as a therapist, explaining why they kept such odd meeting times, since that's probably not legal. all of that would be off-the-record.

Uhh... but when you put it that way, it actually sounds totally like Sherlock Holmes. You should adjust your point, because I'm on your side and even I don't see it.

Well, at least you're not arguing that every other detective show was inspired by Holmes, thus this cannot be a ripoff because it's ripping off other rip-offs. (A straight-faced argument I heard elsewhere)

Allow me to clarify my phrasing, then: I feel fairly comfortable saying that at its heart Sherlock Holmes meant to be about one guy being awesome more than it's supposed to be about everyone else around that guy sucking. Admittedly, even in the original Doyle books and stories there are points where the average mystery-savvy reader is more struck by how stupid the police are than how clever Holmes is being, and many adaptations exaggerate the uselessness of Lestrade and company, but watching police incompetence in action not what people read Sherlock Holmes for. IMO, Elementary could stand to be more aware of the fine line.

Incidentally, when I refer to "doing what's in the police's job description", I don't just mean "get the bad guy." I'm referring to methods. In 1885, there was no expectation that the police would be examining blood under a microscope or be able to tell the height of the killer from bruise marks. Today our expectations are a bit higher, so I think Elementary's going to have a tough road ahead of them if they're committed to making their modern Holmes seem down-to-earth in his abilities. Just tossing the police the idiot ball isn't satisfying, and to me it's even less satisfying if he's going to keep getting to the answer faster or more reliably than the police every week by questionable leaps of intuition when in theory there ought to be a serious forensic investigation going on behind the scenes. If the deductions involved had been really airtight and well-explained, I'd have been okay with it, but in the premiere I mainly thought the writers couldn't make Holmes look useful without pretending modern police procedure and methods of investigation did not exist. In case we need examples: ( Did the husband really shoot the killer and then search his home thoroughly for the cell phone without leaving any fingerprints or trace evidence behind that might suggest it wasn't a suicide? Did the police not notice that the guy had a big old bottle of Xanax when his shrink had been dead for eighteen months? Did Holmes really save the police time, as he claims, by catching that the strangulation marks on the victim were made by a tall guy, or did the script just pretend that medical examiners are never sent to crime scenes so that Holmes had something to do?) I could keep going.

edited 1st Oct '12 8:07:13 PM by Bailey

Still enjoying this, which is surprising for a new television drama.

I am really enjoying this show, too. It's fun, the actors are doing a great job, the cases make you wonder "whodunit", and even if it has its predictable moments ( I knew from the start that the commotion at the hospital was fake.) it still manages to keep you interested through the whole hour.

I also want to see a Sherlock!Sherlock vs Elementary!Sherlock battle.

Surprisingly enough, quite enjoyable, and something to watch in the autumn season. As for the "incompetent police"/"realistic Holmes", I think that from what I know (mind you, I have no actual knowledge of police procedures whatsoever, so I'm basing my assumptions on comments/complaints about various police procedural shows), the police seem to be fairly realistic, while Holmes is this show's Enhance Button - where other shows have tests which could take days or weeks to complete done in 5 minutes, Elementary has Holmes. That's my reading of it.

...except for the DNA test. That was ridiculously fast.

Okay just finish watching the pilot. It's not bad, It's no Sherlock by a long shot but it's not bad at all.

Johnny Lee Mille basically plays Holmes as what House would be like if he was a detective. Elementary!Holmes is not a super genius nor are we the viewers are meant to think of him as such. There is no forced 'GOD THIS GUY IS SMART' moments when Holmes compares shoes sizes or realises the victim knew her assailant from the glass shards. This is a much more humble take on Holmes both in abilities and character. Perhaps most telling is Holmes notes how 'he hates it when he is right' when he uncovers a murder victim when one would half expect his BBC equivalent to start dancing an Irish jig while writing 'told you so' out of the dead woman's blood.

Lucy Li as John Joan Watson is not a bad as it sounds on paper but I don't care for the changes they made to himher. She apparently has never been in war, shies away from dead body and doesn't even refer to herself as a doctor(!). Hopeful in time we will seen some of that classic crime fighting partnership between himher and Homes but so far she is effectively filling the role of Mrs Hudson: The long suffering woman figure to ring her hands when Holmes does something unorthodox or 'wacky'. Ugh.

I won't start picking holes in the plot but... Why didn't the husband know about the panic room and if he did why hide it from the police? also it's not really a plot point but was anyone else annoyed by the rather 'PG-13' depiction of the killer's motivation? Did he just take rejection badly and strangle the wife out of rage or was there meant to be some sort of psycho sexual thing going on? I'm not saying they should turn this into law and order SVU but it felt like the sort of sanitised take on violence you see in shows like Monk or Psych. I know it's not a comfortable subject matter but I feel being more explicit about it would suit the show's 'realistic' tone more.

All in all a pretty good detective drama which I do plan to watch again. But not much more than that.

Three and a half stars ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

ITA on Watson, would it have been that hard for them to have made her an Army surgeon? Hey, she even could have been in Afghanistan like John with a case of PTSD to explain why she shied away from the body. On the other hand I'll cheerfully watch Lucy Liu in anything.

edited 11th Oct '12 5:28:19 AM by tricksterson