A murder scene with no body, baffled cops milling about. An eccentric British consulting detective picks up a marble, places it gingerly on the floorboards and watches it roll swiftly down a corridor. Panic rooms, the detective explains to the officers trailing behind him, are heavy. And the weight of one can give the floor of an apartment an imperceptible tilt. The marble comes to a halt against a wall. The British man presses a hidden switch and, with a swoosh, a secret door opens. A gasp, a flourish and the thrum of a violin. Cut to an ad break.
This is Elementary, the single-best modern depiction of Sherlock Holmes ever committed to screen. A bold claim? Not really. Arriving four months after the end of House, in which Hugh Laurie played Holmes as a doctor, and in the wake of the almost fetishistically self-aware Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman playing the leads, Elementary had its work cut out for it. For one thing, this seminal British story was airing on US network television. For another, the core premise seemed nothing but a novelty. John Watson, Holmes’ longtime companion, gender-flipped to become Joan. New York swapped for London. Gauche, cried the purists. A cheap trick that was bound to fail.
But from the pilot it was immediately apparent that Elementary was no mere imitator. Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson, an ex-surgeon of some repute, is slogging her way through a career crisis, having taken up a job as a sober companion, a chaperone for recovering addicts. She lands a new client: an unspeakably rich man who needs his genius son, a consulting detective from London, looked after while he attempts to recover from heroin addiction.
Enter Sherlock. Jonny Lee Miller has always been a performer of great depth, but this is a sustained, almost unparalleled act of brilliance, Miller committing with magnificent gusto. Not a single moment is phoned-in. His Sherlock is a recovering addict, overloaded by stimuli and tortured by his inability to shut out the noise around him. His brain fizzes and pops like a live wire, but he neither wants nor needs help. Still, he sees something, however faint, in Watson and Watson sees something in him. As part of her contract, she moves into his New York brownstone to keep an eye on the self-destructive iconoclast. The game is well and truly afoot.
Miller’s Sherlock bristles with micro-affectations; while idle, his hands dance about, an unconscious tic, fingers zipping across the strings of a violin which isn’t there. Rage, barely restrained, twitches behind his eyes. He paces, frets, fumes. And where Cumberbatch’s Sherlock eschewed character development with an almost sociopathic disdain, Elementary revels in the possibilities at hand. This Sherlock longs for connection and lets Watson into his world, bit by bit. BBC’s Sherlock placed its dynamic duo stuck in a kind of hateful stasis, but Elementary allowed these two timeless heroes to grow into something more.
Elementary also has a great supporting cast. Aiden Quinn plays the utterly brilliant Captain Gregson, the senior NYPD detective whose understanding of (and perhaps even love for) Sherlock becomes a deeply gratifying and complex through-line of the series. Marcus Bell, played by Jon Michael Hill, is a young black detective who, initially confounded by Sherlock’s methods, soon becomes a steadfast ally and a complex character in his own right.
The show also plays with Sherlock’s legacy in ways too delicious to spoil here. It revels in the history of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world without being crude, and it spends seven excellent seasons using Doyle’s characters, and world, to make something truly worthwhile. Behind the week-by-week crime procedural, which sees Sherlock and Watson solving a variety of isolated cases, overarching threats bubble away. There’s one big, overarching story being told in Elementary, one that is surprisingly ambitious and satisfyingly faithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle. Somehow, the truncated seventh and final season is one of the best: a kind of victory lap ending with a finale that ranks among the finest episodes. Rarely has a show stuck the landing quite like this.
Sherlock Holmes used to say that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Truth is, Elementary is something profoundly special.
Elementary is streaming on Stan and Paramount+. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
