Super Bowl to boost Elementary
Holmes reboot lands coveted post-game slot
It’s an elementary rule of thumb in the TV business that whatever program follows the Super Bowl on U.S. TV, it’s guaranteed sky-high ratings. The Super Bowl traditionally racks up some of the biggest audience numbers of the year, and the programs that follow have a history of setting records of their own.
The brain trust behind Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as hip, updated-to-present-day incarnations of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, could hardly have deduced that their relatively modest first-year series would be handed the coveted postSuper Bowl slot this time, though.
Elementary’s Super Bowl episode, The Deductionist, finds Holmes pursuing career criminal Martin Ennis, played by character actor Terry Kinney, together with an FBI profiler and biographer, who wrote the book on Ennis — literally, played by Lethbridge, Alta.’s Kari Matchett.
Elementary will air in Canada on Global TV, shortly after the game ends, in simultaneous broadcast with CBS. The Super Bowl will air in Canada on CTV, which has its own postSuper Bowl plans: the debut of the homegrown, Vancouver-based police procedural Motive.
“It’s been a bear, but in a lovely way,” Elementary creator and head writer Rob Doherty said this month, as he applied the finishing touches to the Super Bowl episode.
Following the Big Game is both blessing and burden, he said.
“I’m stressed,” he said simply. “To be honest I’m stressed out all the time anyway, so it’s hard to go from 10 to 11. Mostly, though, we feel excitement. It’s an honour. It’s a privilege. It’s an opportunity to expose the show to people who may not have checked it out yet. So we developed a story that we hope is not only a good example of what the show can do, but something our regular audience will have fun with as well.”
Elementary has proven surprisingly resilient in Canada, as well as the U.S. An episode during New Year’s week drew 1.9 million viewers, making it the fifthmost-watched program that week in the entire country, behind only The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, The Mentalist and Blue Bloods.
Miller said that from his point of view it doesn’t take much deductive reasoning to see why Elementary has struck the collective nerve. When you have eliminated the impossible — the impossibility, for example, that CBS would choose Made in Jersey to follow the Super Bowl instead of Elementary — whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Miller said he’s worked in film and television long enough not to trust hunches about which projects might succeed and which might fail.
“You don’t get hunches,” he said simply. “You hope for the best and you try to do the best that you can. You never in your wildest dreams imagine that you might have the No. 1 mostwatched new show. Your first goal is to stay on the air, in any new show. That’s job one. You make the project that you want to make. You make the show you want to make, and you make it as good as you can. Just to stay. To be given the order for a full season was wonderful news for all of us. Anything beyond that was really amazing.
“You hear all these various permutations of numbers, demographics, leadins and all that, and it can be quite confusing. So we tend to just concentrate on our work.”
Reimagining Sherlock Holmes meant more to Miller than simply brushing dust off an old book and studying other actors’ interpretations. He approached his own stylized version of Holmes as if everything were a fresh discovery.
“One thing I love about this character is he’s quite raw,” Miller said. “His struggles are on the surface. Hopefully that makes it more enjoyable for the people watching, and they can identify with that.”