i firmly believe that elementary is not only the best sherlock holmes adaptation, but one of the best tv shows ever written. is it outlandish and a bit silly? of course it is. it's a sherlock holmes adaptation.
but to set one of the most classic british characters in the middle of new york? hilarious. funnier still, sherlock actually seems to disdain this himself quite often.
to make john watson, a traditionally long suffering and slightly stand offish man, into a woman? to make her a retired surgeon who left medicine after failing to save someone's life, and instead turning to working as a sober companion? to have her early seasons characterised by a constant battle between satisfying her desire to help people with a rigid determination to live up to the expectations of her family and peers, and actual self-fufillment? made all the more poignant by having her played by an asian-american woman, a demographic for whom those battles are all too often laid at the feet of? breathtaking.
to make moriarty a woman? to make her sinister and cruel and unyielding but also giving her nuance and failings? AND toxic yuri-ism with watson? sensational.
and perhaps most importantly: to make sherlock a believable genius, someone astonishingly intelligent but astoundingly driven by the desire to do good, to be good. to make him profoundly offended at the abuse of power, at violence against the vulnerable, to make him a champion of people who have been victimised not because he is clever enough to be above such things but because he is genuinely appauled by it. and, to make him an addict, not as some barely noted sideplot or zippy one-line reference, but as a continuous story of personal development and fighting, in which the phantom of his addiction is not vanished by the power of love but an ever-present threat that hangs over everything he does despite his best efforts. this version of sherlock more than any other is powered, singularly, by fighting to be better not than everyone around him, but better than himself the day before. he is still arrogant and proud and occassionally cruel, but he is also allowed to learn and get better and he is enriched by the people who surround him.
elementary took every identifiable factor in the sherlock holmes story, flipped it on its head, and came up with something more endearing, more heartfelt, and more genuine than almost any other adaptation ever, with a strong, well-written, well-developed platonic relationship at its core, and mrs hudson being a smoking hot trans woman who knits cosies for sherlock's tortoise. never has a show reached for such heights and landed so beyond its aim before.
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