On "Elementary"

As a fan of the BBC series Sherlock, which features Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson and is set in modern-day Britain, I've always had a bit of what one might call a prejudice against the new CBS series Elementary, which is also supposed to be a modernized Sherlock Holmes, but set in New York. With Jonny Lee Miller playing Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu playing Joan Watson. Yes, Joan Watson. I say prejudice because I've never particularly seen it, and have been basically assuming it isn't any good, so it's a literal pre-judging, though also arguably a prejudice based on my liking of Sherlock, which it is widely seen as being derivative of. It's not entirely pre-judging, though, because I know what the concept is, and I have one particular problem with that concept: they didn't make Holmes female. This isn't a fatal flaw, because if you're going to make one of the characters female there's a 50% chance you'd hit Watson, but it feels a bit curious that they did make the sidekick the female one, not the hero.

Well, just now I got an actual little taste of Elementary, because when I turned my TV on looking for the golf (it's in Asia, and is therefore on in the middle of the night, which is brilliant) it started out on CBS, where Elementary was playing. And my reaction was as follows. Jonny Lee Miller, thankfully, is English, and has an English accent. Moreover, he seems perfectly competent at portraying the intelligent side of his character and the rude side of his character, though I didn't particularly see the eccentric side of the character in the few minutes I saw. The overall aesthetic, however, felt like a New York crime drama, not particularly Holmesian at all. And, as best I can tell, unlike Sherlock they're not drawing on the original Holmes stories for material.

On top of that, though, the more I think about the way they're portraying Watson the less I like it. Because it's not just that they're taking the Holmes-Watson "bromance," to use the modern, really, really unfortunate term, and making one of the parties to it female, and sort of daring the world to find it inappropriate. They haven't just taken John Watson, the war veteran who happens to find himself rooming with the insane genius, and changed his name to Joan and given him a sex change. They've invented a whole separate pretext! Joan Watson is apparently supposed to be Holmes' "sober companion," (a term which I cannot help but hear in terms of the "companions" from Doctor Who) who accompanies him after his rehab and makes sure he doesn't relapse. Because, you see, evidently they couldn't just make a female Watson, have her have the same non-romantic close friendship with the male Holmes, and make a point about how gender roles are rightfully more fluid now. In order to set up a woman becoming a close, non-sexual friend of Holmes', they need a pretext.

So in the end, the details of how they structure their Watson character ends up robbing it of most of its potentially feminist/gender-egalitarian power while simultaneously making the whole thing feel less like it's actually an interpretation of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. So one is somewhat inevitably left with the feeling that they've made Watson female, and indeed are calling the characters Holmes and Watson in the first place, just for attention. Whereas Sherlock is very plainly the same characters in a different setting, as becomes readily apparent by watching the first episode. There's just no comparison between the two.

(Which isn't surprising, really, given which of them is run by Steven Moffat.)