season 2 on netflix!
The second (?—I forget) message with the random letters was too easy, sadly. You can guess it just from word length. The pig one was better, because I was trying to figure out how two letters could possibly be together in the second word and scrapped my initial plan.
Did anyone watch “Elementary?” It’s terrible.
We’re drowning in a sea of eccentric detectives.
Gave it a shot. Jonny Lee Miller isn’t as good at being a charismatic jerk as Downey Jr., nor is he as good at being a smarmy prick as Cumberbatch, and I am left wondering exactly what the point of him is. And then a scene with Liu as Watson crops up and I realize that Miller is there to remind us what acting looks like.
It’s not as clever as Moffat’s Sherlock or as exciting as Ritchie’s films, and obviously it hardly stands toe to toe with classic interpretations. It just feels like doing “Sherlock, but with a twist!” for the sake of having it on the air when it was deemed profitable to do so. If they keep it a mere crime procedural with a sarcastic know-it-all played against a sexy-but-tough-but-secretly-emotional woman/sex object, it’ll fit into American TV well enough, but I can’t help but think that any attempts they make to shoehorn in the Holmes mythos are going to be. . . unfortunate.
Which isn’t great sense something near the end of this episode feels like some very blunt foreshadowing of an Irene Adler encounter down the road.
I will give it one thing: it’s a lot grittier than Moffat’s Holmesiverse. While the opening death scene suffered from an overabudance of Hollywood glitz and cinematographically “perfect” posing, most of the rest of the episode felt like it took place in a New York sent back 20 years to a time of far worse drug use, violence, and poverty. Not a lot of the crime shows capture that well–Moffat doesn’t even try, though he’s not in the same genre.
The problem is they didn’t do enough twisting. The pilot feels like a poor man’s Mentalist. It’s like the problem John Carter of Mars had. While that may have been an incredibly faithful recreation of a seminal work of genre literature, we are 100 years deep in derivative works so unless it cleaves as close to the source as Sherlock does while cleverly rendering the original mysteries in a modern world (bouyied by incredible actors), or employs a novel spin on the premise like House or Psych, it just comes off like a cliche jukebox.
Elementary was terrible. Too much CSI, not enough Baker Street.
-Tom
I think you hit the nail on the head. The issue’s compounded by the fact that Jonny Lee Miller’s nowhere near as charasmatic as Simon Bakker and Lucy Liu’s nowhere near as cute or convincing as Robin Tunney.
Thanks for this. Since I loved Sherlock, but didn’t like the movies, you’ve convinced me to avoid wasting my time on it.
Why doesnt Elementary have it’s own thread instead of using this one?
It hasn’t earned the right.
Maybe he meant “why are we not keeping the bad modern-day Sherlock series away from the good modern-day Sherlock series?”
Y’know, like in quarantine.
I finally got around to watching the BBC Sherlock pilot. It definitely was not what I expected.
The series tries to do more comedy than I was expecting. A lot of it is pretty heavy handed and clunky. Plus the pilot also tried to do a lot of CG/special effects that sometimes looked cheesy enough that I got a cheap Doctor Who BBC vibe instead of the regular Masterpiece Theater BBC quality drama vibe that I was expecting.
Overall though, I liked it. Just not as much as I was expecting to. I guess I had my expectations too high. I’ll continue to watch them all, of course. I just hope they try to do less special effects and comedy.
Wait, did you watch the ACTUAL pilot that was scrapped and redone into the first ep of the series proper, or are you talking about the aired ep one? Because I’ve not heard many good things about the former, but there’s definitely humor in the latter. Don’t remember a whole lot of CG, TBH
I watched whatever is on Netflix. I’m guessing the actual aired first episode.
It gets better. I remember not being blown away by the first episode. I think it is probably the weakest of them.
I’m partway through Season 2, Episode 1 now. The second season seems to have had a nice budget boost and way better production values.
One thing this show is doing is it’s really making me miss Hugh Laurie and House. Sherlock in this series is so much like House, which isn’t surprising since House was inspired by Sherlock Holmes as well. But I don’t know, the humor in House was so much less clunky and the music and production was all so much better done than Sherlock.
Nevertheless, House didn’t have a Moriarty, so that’s advantage Sherlock.
I’m guessing you’ve forgotten about the Hound of the Baskervilles episode then. The first episode is uneven. The Hound of the Baskervilles is fucking awful.
I just got through watching these. I was so surprised when Moriarty offed himself. There has got to be a trick in there somehow… I can’t understand how someone would actually willingly kill them self in a situation like that. Also, I have a hunch that the way SH survived is not so clear cut as some people have put out. I remember reading a comment by Moffat that all of the theory’s he’d read online were wrong.
I started to really like the show. The first episode is a little rocky, but it’s still really good.
I don’t think this has been posted yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llGXWICGsD4