Elementary, my dear Watson

[beatrice_otter]

When I first heard of the premise of Elementary, I was both hopeful and skeptical.  Hopeful, because although I really like the BBC's Sherlock, on the whole I don't care for the way it (in general) handles women and people of color.  Skeptical, because Sherlock is brilliant, and how could they hope to match it, and Hollywood always goes gimmicky.

I watched the first episode, and was not impressed.  Not disappointed; it was decent, I was just kind of meh about it.

But I gave it a chance and kept watching, and I am so glad I did.  It's definitely grown on me.  It's not smart in the same way as Sherlock; they weren't trying to do "an American Sherlock with a genderswapped Watson" (to their credit).  They took Conan Doyle's canon and modernized it in their own way.  It's not flashy, but it's solid, and I believe in its realness in a way Sherlock has never quite convinced me.  I love Sherlock, don't get me wrong, but there's quite a lot of suspension of disbelief on my part.  With Elementary, I don't have to do that because the characters feel real to me, like I might bump into them on the street.  They're still a bit larger than life, but not over-the-top/theatrical about it.

I particularly love Joan Watson.  She's smart, she's professional, she doesn't take crap from Holmes.  And she has a reason to stick around to get to know Sherlock beneath the weird exterior besides "it's needed for the plot!"  She has her own life and her own issues, and they don't revolve around Sherlock, though they do include him.

Is anyone else out there watching this show?

Comments

[melannen]

I keep hearing good things about this show lately and thinking maybe I should try it! But the bad things usually come down to "the casefiles aren't that good" and considering I dropped House (and attempted to drop Sherlock off a roof) because of repeatedly bad and increasingly stupid casefiles, I am hesitant. Are the casefiles improving?

[lilacsigil]

The casefiles are not great, but that's because they're easy rather than ridiculous like the House ones got. The show knows perfectly well it's not providing genius plotting and instead concentrates on its strengths, which is the casefiles providing character opportunities.

[beatrice_otter]

It depends on what you want from the casefiles. If you want exotic, over-the-top, world-ending, and unbelievably weird (as you get in most casefile shows these days), you will be disappointed. Elementary's casefiles are odd and tough to figure out, but in a believable way (except for one, which still wasn't as ... theatrical as the most ordinary BBC!Sherlock case). It's not that the police couldn't solve these cases, the cases aren't that unbelievably fiendish. It's that Sherlock will spot and work through things a lot quicker, and go off on a tangent to get other stuff while the police are doing a lot of the basic policework and so catch the killer much quicker. That's another thing I like about it--unlike BBC!Sherlock, the show recognizes that modern police have things like forensics and stuff, and are actually competent. And we get to see them being competent (though not brilliant) at their jobs. And we get to see Sherlock be wrong a few times an episode as he works through the evidence, figuring out theories and discarding them as he and Watson and the police work through the evidence and figure out whodunnit.