Elementary puts new twists on old Holmes
In a down-at-heel Brooklyn brownstone, one of the most famous fictional characters of all time is standing, staring at a collection of television sets, naked from the waist up and heavily inked with a collection of colourful tattoos. Fresh out of rehab and relocated to New York City, this is Sherlock Holmes, 2012-style, as played by Jonny Lee Miller in a new U.S. TV version.
More dramatic even than a tattooed junkie Holmes, however, is the portrayal, for the first time ever, of Watson as a woman — Dr Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu. Certainly, no one could accuse the creators of Elementary, which airs in Canada on Global, of a lack of imagination when it comes to reconfiguring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic texts.
Nor a lack of fanfare: New York has countless colossal posters plastered across buildings and subway stops. There is even a billboard in a corner spot in Times Square, with the two leading actors’ faces 12 metres high.
Blanket advertising by the network giant CBS, which makes the series, aside, playing a prime-time Holmes was too good a chance to pass up says the British actor, whose breakthrough roles in the mid-1990s included the films Hackers — where he met his first wife, Angelina Jolie — and Trainspotting, in which he played the slickly charming heroin addict, Sick Boy.
“You don’t get asked to lead a CBS show every day,” Miller says humbly. “America has always been more enthusiastic about giving me certain opportunities than the U.K.,” he shrugs. He has lived in the United States for seven years now, and is married to American, actress and model Michele Hicks.
Miller’s Holmes is no less of a whip-smart, if somewhat smug, crime-solving genius than previous personifications. But whereas in the original Victorian short stories and novels, and the numerous reworkings since, Holmes’s dabbling in opium and cocaine was, at best, recreational, at worst, functioning dependency, this Sherlock has been seriously derailed by his drug habits.
“The last paragraph of Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet is: ‘For me, there still remains the cocaine bottle.’ Holmes used liquid cocaine,” says Miller, eyes widening. “You can’t really have him using drugs in such a flamboyant way in a modern-day version without addressing that it is a problem.”
The show’s creator and executive producer, Rob Doherty, believes this schism is where his Holmes differs dramatically from previous incarnations.
“In all the books and movies over the years, the impression I got was of someone very collected, very together, always 10 steps ahead,” he says. “And I was really interested in the idea of a Sherlock who broke down, and who was taken by surprise that he could break down, because everything always came so easily for him.”
“When you know from an early age that you can see how everything fits together, there is a certain ease, a certain swagger and arrogance,” he continues. “So to have a crippling setback has got to change your world view for someone like Sherlock.”
Holmes’s breakdown is also the impetus for Watson’s presence. Liu’s Joan is his “sober companion,” a former surgeon employed by Holmes’s wealthy father to keep him straight.
“We have a push-pull relationship, because of the position she is in and because of his addiction. There’s always going to be a struggle,” says Liu, 43, who, with her striking cheekbones and feline features is surely the prettiest Watson to date.