Sherlock: Season 1 (2010)

It’s been speculated that in the near future we will arrive at Singularity – a state in which neural and digital technology finally converge into a new way of being alive, or being connected. As if in anticipation of that moment, the television crime procedural has undergone something of a change over the last decade, moving towards forensic minds that have mutated in order to to remain one step ahead of the latest informational horizons. Sometimes their mutations are intellectual, sometimes they’re perceptual, but they nearly always fall outside the traditional forensic hierarchy, as if the solitary investigators of yore had given rise to a new breed of consultants, sent back in time from a Singular future to impart some of their gifts to the present. In some ways, Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of Sherlock Holmes is the apex of that process, transforming Doyle’s beloved detective into the last of the great human investigators, the closest we can get to data procedural before we start to become post-human. Where Holmes’ original deductions were titillating because they were only just beyond our reach, it makes about as much sense to keep up with Cumberbatch as it would to try an emulate a computational algorithm, or a Google Search. Even his conclusions, recreations and explanations are largely irrelevant, as the series subsists more on the ebb and flow of data than any specific informational nugget, a thick ambience that spikes and broods around hubs and nodes that are otherwise invisible or imperceptible. Beyond a certain level, this new version of Holmes doesn’t deduct so much as simply intuit and navigate data, which means that the series also takes place in London at its most millennial, the London of the Eye. All that might make it sound like quite an austere experience, not least because the BBC have chosen to structure each season around three-movie length events, precluding the cosy familarity of, say, Elementary, without quite matching the immersive intensity of the cyberpunk film franchise. But what’s unusual is that Sherlock’s very austerity is what allows him to relax a bit when it comes to Dr. John Watson, played by Martin Freeman, along with the other regular characters. Certainly, he still gets impatient with them, but it’s the impatience of one species with another, and so never really lasts that long, always settling into a stranger, more singular kind of warmth than you get in the stories, the affection post-humans might one day be expected to feel for humans, as well as for their own residual or provisional humanity.