Elementary: Series 1 (2012)

Elementary is the “other” Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Set in New York, it features Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as his sidekick, Dr. Joan Watson. In this version, Sherlock’s a recovering heroin addict, and Joan’s his sober companion, allowing Miller to revive the twitchy, manic energy he brought to Trainspotting, even if he doesn’t quite aim for the data procedurals of Sherlock. Where Benedict Cumberbatch’s endless computations and permutations drove Holmes’ casebook into movie-length events, Elementary is more episodic, retaining the short-form narrative that suited Doyle best, while devising completely new crime narratives in the process. As a result, it’s perhaps truer to the spirit and tenor of Doyle’s hero, who valued brevity and efficiency above all else, as well as the structure of Doyle’s stories, which often operate on a truncated three-act basis, taking us rapidly through two false conclusions before settling on a third. In other words, it’s not quite as quirky as it might first appear – if anything, it offers us a classicist Holmes, as least in comparison to the BBC version, as well as the cyberpunk movie franchise. Certainly, the action may have relocated to New York, but that just enhances Holmes’ inextricable brand of Englishness, which could run the risk of seeming ridiculous or old-fashioned set against England itself. And the directors go to some lengths to make New York look like London, or at least look less like itself, drawing upon the familiar iconography of subways, skyscrapers and Central Park so rarely that you start to feel as if early C21st New York might actually offer the best approximation for C20th London, at least in tone and atmosphere. Both cities are vanguards of empires in decline, and in both cities Holmes’ investigations tend to pore and puzzle over just how widely that empire has cast its web, how drastically it might have over-extended itself. In Doyle’s stories, those speculations were often lost in vague, distant, orientalist murk, but here Lucy Liu punctures those soft horizons with a dry, deadpan delivery that makes the American empire suddenly seem undomesticated, uncontainable, totally at odds with suburban Brooklyn, where every establishing shot seems to take place. And as the most anarchic, uncontainable fringe of everything he touches, Holmes is a continual state of perplexity about whether he’s an American as well, until it’s a bit like witnessing naturalisation or nationalisation in slow-motion, England wondering whether it’s too late to even both differentiating itself from America any more.