Sherlock goes overseas in ‘Elementary’
LONDON—Perhaps it was elementary, after all.
The detective drama “Elementary” is back for a second season after silencing skeptics by garnering critical praise and strong ratings.
The show, which stars Jonny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes in New York, returns to CBS in the United States on Thursday—further evidence of the Holmes’ inexhaustible appeal.
When “Elementary” first aired a year ago, there were plenty of doubters: Another Sherlock? Set in America? With—horrors—a female Watson?
Even Lucy Liu, who plays Watson— Dr. Joan Watson—said she warned the show’s creator, Robert Doherty: “This is dangerous territory.”
“To be honest, the pressure is on, but it’s even more so for the writers and the executives,” Liu said during an interview amid the elegant Georgian buildings of the Old Naval College in London, where the cast and crew decamped this summer for a set-in-Britain season premiere. “They have to change, modernize, something that is beloved in literature.
She said she told Doherty he could “change the characters’ names. You don’t have to have it Holmes and Watson. You could just make it anything and it could be a new, fresh idea.”’
Doherty would have none of it. Holmes, he said, is eternal—and ubiquitous.
The BBC’s acclaimed series starring Benedict Cumberbatch is currently filming a third three-episode series, and Ian McKellen has been announced as an elderly Holmes in upcoming movie “A Slight Trick of the Mind.”
“I remember saying, ‘ Look around the dial—Sherlock Holmes is everywhere,”’ said Doherty, who wrote for “Star Trek: Voyager” and was a writer and executive producer on the psychic mystery series “Medium.”
“He is a paradigm. He is the original detective. (Arthur) Conan Doyle created this paradigm that has obviously influenced and shaped most of the detectives that we’ve seen in literature, in films and TV shows, since his inception.”
In any case, the affable Doherty —a huge Sherlock Holmes fan—says he has a thick skin.
“If you’re getting into the Sherlock Holmes business and you’re afraid of comparisons or skepticism, you’re in the wrong business,” he said. “The fun of it for me was taking everything we knew to be his history and his setting and his partnership, and shifting it by a matter of degrees.”