I was first exposed to the British television show Sherlock while sitting at my kitchen table over a year ago. I looked down and suddenly saw Benedict Cumberbatch’s face staring up at me from TV Guide.
As soon as I realized the article inside was about Sherlock Holmes,I skimmed it eagerly. I was excited to learn about the new British television show, Sherlock, a modernization of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, which seemed to be getting promising reviews. I was very interested in watching it (which is saying a lot for me, since I don’t watch a lot of T.V.), but alas…it was Sunday. I had last-minute homework to attend to.
And so it was that I didn’t watch any of the Sherlock episodes when they first aired on PBS. It wasn’t until the summer, when I had no homework to stop me, that I watched season one on Netflix with my friend in upstate New York, where we could barely get an Internet connection. She was already in love with the show—indeed, she has been a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories since she was about five-years-old. And over those next few days when we watched all three episodes, I, too, fell in love with the show.
Really, when it comes to Sherlock, it’s more a question of “What’s not to love?” The writers Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Steve Thompson have created intriguing, intricate plots with elements lifted straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Sherlock Holmes’ (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. John Watson’s (Martin Freeman) interactions are filled with snappy, intelligent, and, as far as Sherlock is concerned, obnoxious dialogue that starts right when they meet and continues as they begin working together and their friendship grows. And their friendship is the epitome of a bromance—much to fans’ delight. Many people in the show mistakenly assume they are a couple, much to Watson’s annoyance, and to Sherlock’s distracted indifference.
While many elements of the show are different from the original stories, with modernized technology (such as cell phones and texting and Watson’s blog) and updated plotlines to reflect this updated technology, I realized much of the show’s magic comes from the details taken straight from the original stories.
I’ve read some of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. It has been a goal of mine to work my way, slowly but surely, through them all—(with unfortunate emphasis on the word “slowly.”) So I recognized some of the references to the books, but there are many, many more that my friend had caught and I had completely missed. There are so many that it’s almost like a secret language for those who know to look for it. For example, when Sherlock meets Watson in the show’s first episode, A Study in Pink, and deduces that Watson has returned from Afghanistan, his line of reasoning is almost exactly the same as Holmes’ reasoning in A Study in Scarlet. He also looks at Watson’s phone and concludes, among many things, that the phone had originally belonged to a drinker. That also comes from the books, in which Watson instead has a pocket watch.
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There is a scene in which we find out that Sherlock doesn’t know that the Earth goes around the sun. Watson can’t believe it, and Sherlock explains that his brain is like a hard drive with limited space: “This is my hard drive, and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful. Really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish, and that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters! Do you see?” He doesn’t know the composition of the solar system in the books either, and instead compares his mind to a crowded attic when he explains why.
There are all kinds of details, whether significant or purely amusing, that are taken straight from the original stories: Sherlock’s drug use, the way he experiments on dead bodies and keeps them around, the way he is able to track a taxi cab, the way he deduces what a victim meant when she scratched “rache” into the floor before she died. And there are many, many more.
And it is these kinds of details that give the show such depth and richness. It is of course still possible to love and appreciate the show without recognizing them, but there is more to the show than what is seen on the surface (and I say this even though what’s on the surface is pretty appealing on its own. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch play off of each other so well—and regarding the latter, well, who can resist those cheekbones?).
The whole show is incredibly well done. The plotlines, the dialogue, the character interaction and development, the acting, the music—everything. But one of the most impressive aspects of the show is the subtle and not-so-subtle ways it pays tribute to the original stories. And I hope that as Sherlock becomes more successful and gains even more fans, those fans will not only watch the show, but will also start making their way through the books. Because the brilliance of the show started somewhere—and that “somewhere,” the original Sherlock Holmes stories and characters and details, all thought up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, deserve some recognition, too.
And surely Sherlock Holmes would agree that these connections deserve some space in our crowded minds. After all, he was all about recognizing the details.