Here it is!
So - how was it?
edit: stupid grammar
I quite enjoyed it. I’ve been a Jonny Lee Miller fan since Eli Stone (and then I realized he was Sickboy!), and Lucy Liu is very well cast as his Watson.
It seems they’ve done a real good job modernizing Holmes, and the characters are very believable. I like a female Watson; my wife felt a great deal of sexual tension, and while I didn’t (Holmes has a very utilitarian view of sex), I do think that dynamic will play out nicely.
Of course, this (and Revolution) are the only new fall shows I’ve been interested in, so naturally they will both be cancelled.
I really liked it (and was really surprised by liking it). It was less CSI than I feared. Funny though, since Lucy Liu just came off a season of Southland where she played a troubled cop who got in trouble for killing a kid in the line of duty, it was easy for me to imagine her as this Watson the troubled surgeon who killed a patient on the job.
I thought it was pretty good, though I feel like this is sort of a sad copy of the BBC Sherlock series. However, for network TV, it was pretty good! Going to keep watching.
I thought it was mediocre, but am willing to give it a few episodes to see if it improves. It helps that I’m a fan of Lucy Liu. I’m beginning to suspect she might be a vampire though, because I swear that woman hasn’t aged a day in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, poor Aidan Quinn has aged so much I barely recognized him.
Man, I didn’t think there was the slightest spark between Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, and that pretty much kills the show for me. I did like Miller’s performance, but as far as the two of them connecting in any meaningful way, they might as well have been shooting on separate days.
What’s more, I didn’t get much sense of context for either of these characters. So Sherlock’s dad is looking out for him and Watson has guilt. That’s pretty much it. Remember the cool stuff in the BBC version with Mycroft, and Moriarty, and the coroner chick, and Watson’s therapist, and the landlady at Baker Street, and the Lestrade counterpart? I guess we do have the Lestrade counterpart in Elementary, but all I could tell about him is that he gets a bit of dialogue that supposedly justifies why there’s an Englishman in New York.
Furthermore, there is virtually nothing distinctly Sherlock Holmes here. Consider how the BBC show plays with so many elements of the Sherlock Holmes mythology, and even the specific stories. I don’t see a single iota of that in Elementary. Maybe the sobriety thing, but are they even going to play with that? This could be any random TV detective, and not a terribly exciting one at that. I imagine every week will be based on some sort of silly last-minute reveal like the bag of rice. The suspect has a rice allergy? Really? Is that even a thing?
-TomAnd this was pretty much it for me. It was fine. I liked both the leads (though I’ve said before I’m a fan of both of theirs). Trouble is, this really wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. They really didn’t try to put in anything from the original stories, though I imagine they would have been crucified as ‘derivative’ if they had. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
I’ll give it a few more episodes to see where it goes, but I wasn’t that thrilled with it.
Yeah, It’s okay. Standard fare, a little more than mediocre and maybe even pretty well done for that category – we’ll see – but nothing close to what BBC Sherlock’s achieving. (Sad is the operative word there. Why embark on a project like this now?)
I suppose it’s something you probably need to have tried to spot (bagged an iPad for a friend in rice after hers got dunked), but it wasn’t quite the last second reveal, since I spotted that big ol “Basmati” and figured out where the phone was. And yes, rice allergy is a real thing.
As to the rest (and probably more important parts), yeah, I’d agree in general with your assessment of the show. Still, I’m willing to see if it develops for the moment.
I didn’t know about (or remember) the rice drying thing either but was looking at that bag, too and wondered why they’d lingered on it until the end. It did feel like a micromacduffin.
I liked it better when it was called Monk.
If Miller’s Holmes ends up using tricks to catch villains more often, I’ll stand by the fact that The Mentalist is the best comparison for it.
I enjoyed the first episode, but its not the Sherlock Holmes I like, that being the Robert Downy Jr portrayal.
Ooh, as I’d suspected, Zoe Keating contributed the cello music.
Meh. I’ll give it another week or two to see if it picks up, but as mentioned, there’s just no rapport between Miller and Liu.
Is anyone annoyed at the fact that it feels like Watson is a female only to create ‘sexual tension’?
Still more sexual tension between Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch.
DING!
Quite a bit better tonight, I think.
Seems to be introducing more Holmesy stuff.
Two eps in and my brain is numb by this derivative fluff. Crime solving procedurals are everywhere and this show brings nothing new to the table. At least Hugh Laurie was a fascinating asshole.
I think it would have been interesting to modernize Sherlock in this age of instant information. How would a deductive genius benefit from an iPhone? I dunno something I thought of at the top of my head but something different would have been better then more of the same.