It’s going to be very, very hard for Elementary, CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation, to convince Sherlock diehards that it’s superior in any way to the miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in any way except in that there will be more of it. But every modern interpretation tends to pick one facet of the great detective’s personality and hone in, and so I think Elementary’s decision to focus on Sherlock as an addict will be a nice complement to Sherlock’s focus on Sherlock as someone with potential Asperger syndrome:

In the stories, Watson regularly discusses Holmes’ use of cocaine and morphine, but the stories tend to track away from these conversations rather quickly, as in The Sign of Four where Holmes admits he uses because “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Watson warns him to “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

But his warning is diverted by the arrival of a mental exercise that puts Holmes off his second hit of coke. Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing stories on the assumption that we were more interested in the cases Holmes could solve than in Holmes and Watson themselves. In so much as the mysteries illuminated anything, they illuminated London and British society, and to a much lesser extent, the flexibilities that let said society tolerate a man as singular as Sherlock Holmes, and the limitations that led him, at the end of that case, to declare that “For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”

Today, psychology is the point, and we learn about society and its attitudes through a microscope not a sprawling city map. And with Dr. House finally gone from Fox’s airwaves, there may be room for another cranky, brilliant addict on our airwaves. CBS may favor broad entertainments. But when it comes to gaging the market and looking beyond the PBC and BBC sets, it knows us all too well. Whether Elementary succeeds or fails may determine on how interestingly the show manages to update the narrative of the brilliant addict who turns to drugs to entertain himself in a society that moves too slowly for him to match our contemporary understandings of the science of addiction and the acceptable narrative paths to recovery.

BBC’s hit Sherlock provides a fascinating model of unconventional relationships that stands out from almost everything else on the air right now, and Alyssa’s interview with Steven Moffat last week in which the relationship between Sherlock and Holmes came up was a fascinating glimpse into Moffat’s mind as a creator. I have my own issues with Moffat (oh, do I), but one thing I have to admit he’s done brilliantly with Sherlock is expose audiences to the idea of complex emotional connections between human beings that are not necessarily based on romance or sexuality. And I’m glad to know that this is a deliberately and carefully thought-out choice on his part.

A lot of asexual Sherlock fans read Sherlock as asexual, and there’s certainly ample reason to think that; he talks about being married to his work, and in the original canon as well as Moffat’s work we don’t necessarily see evidence of sexual relationships or sexual attraction. The tension that ran between him and Irene in “A Scandal in Belgravia” was not quite sexual in nature, although it was sexualised; it was an expression of emotionality between a man and a woman who are baffled and excited by each other in a way that didn’t look like sexual attraction so much as it did intellectual and emotional stimulation.
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Maureen Ryan on how irritating it is when television shows like, apparently, USA’s Common Law, feel the need to constantly reiterate that two men who happen to be close aren’t gay:

It’s past time to stop treating gay, lesbian and trans characters as The Other. When “Seinfeld” introduced the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that” in connection to the possibility of a character being gay, GLBTQ characters were a rarity on TV and thus that joke may have served as a sort of crude but useful enlightening tool.

Now that kind of joke — “We’re close friends, but we’re not gay!” — feels like a distancing technique, something that draws attention to gays and lesbians as something out of the norm. That feels wrong for a lot of reasons.

And honestly, who cares? In this day and age, are you telling me that two men who are best friends would constantly have to deal with the assumption that they’re gay? I just find the whole idea fairly preposterous. Who doesn’t know straight men who hang out all the time without anyone thinking about or guessing about their sexuality? How is drawing attention to not-gayness, at this point, anything but a representation of lingering shreds of mild but unmistakable gay panic

This seems like a relic of a transitional moment when lots of folks were starting to come out and straight people who previously had been unaware of the potential existence gay people started to get worried that they didn’t have valuable information they could use to keep from embarrassing themselves. Now, it’s true that said information remains relevant—no one wants to hit on someone who’s unavailable, be it because they’re gay or because they’re married. But we’re really at a point where even straight folks should have learned what makes for reliable gaydar and what doesn’t. Sharing a friendship or a roof with someone of your same gender doesn’t make you a homosexual: it makes you a person who craves connection with other people or who doesn’t have enough money to live alone. And the best way to find out someone’s sexual orientation is to get to know them.

Sunday nights are chock-full of great television, but last night marked the long, long-awaited return of Sherlock, Steven Moffat’s brilliant update of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story about an Afghanistan veteran, his brilliant-but-off-kilter flatmate, and their adventures in a London full of shifting social norms, new technologies, and criminals both diabolically brilliant and accidentally malign. And the show came back with a bang, bringing the previously asexual Sherlock up against Irene Adler, an opera singer with a scandalous secret in the stories turned into a thoughtful, melancholy dominatrix in the update. I spoke to Moffat about our contemporary obsessions with sex, watching Sherlock grow up, and how to interpret Moriarty, the world’s first supervillain, in a way that’s not a cliche given all the characters who were based on him.

You’ve adapted both Sherlock Holmes and Jekyll and Hyde, stories from the turn of the century. Are there parallels you see between that time of technological develop and social change and our own?

Not on purpose. And to be honest, this hasn’t been a long-term plan that I’d adapt victorian fiction. I just like both stories. It wasn’t my idea to do Jekyll, it was a guy called Jeffrey Taylor who approached me about it, and I liked that because I’d always liked the story, and I’ve always been a Sherlock Holmes fan. Is there something particular? I think probably any era is analagous to any other era. People don’t change that much. We’re always doing the same sort of thing. So I think that probably just works. When you’re looking at what causes a scandal in Bohemia as opposed to Belgravia, you have to up the ante a bit, and Irene Adler doesn’t really qualify as a bad girl anymore. She’s an opera singer who married a man and moved house, as far as I can see. As far deadly femme fatales go, she was a little bit on the limited side. I remember when I was reading that story as a kid, Sherlock goes on and on about The Woman, the only one who ever beat him, and you’re thinking, he’s had better villains than this. And then you click: he fancies her, doesn’t he? That’s what it’s about.

I loved that line where Irene says to Watson, ‘you are a couple.’ They’re not sexually involved, but they are partners. Given that there’s always been this speculation over Watson and Holmes, I thought that was an interesting way to resolve the tension.

It’s always definitely a love story. I don’t see why that means that sex has to be involved. What a weirdly sexualized world we live in where you insist they much be having sex as well. Why would they? John isn’t wired that way, whatever Sherlock is. But I think that whole scene, when Irene Adler has to say she’s mostly gay, she has had relationships with men as well, it’s not what it’s about. Sherlock Holmes is indifferent to sex. So is Irene. She uses sex to get what she wants, and John Watson happily has a string of girlfriends. Sex is not really the issue among any of these people. Love is. Infatuation is. I think John Watson is infatuated with and fascinated by Sherlock Holmes. I think Sherlock Holmes absolutley relies completely and utterly on John Watson and is devoted to him. I think Sherlock is infatuated to the point that he can barely function around Irene Adler. And Irene Adler isn’t initially fascinated by him and then falls for him completely, thinks, ‘There’s another person in the world as damaged as I am, how brilliant.’ Who says any of them are having sex with each other?
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There’s a long tradition of trying to crack the famously celibate Sherlock Holmes. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories, the adventuress Irene Adler wins a spot in his pantheon as “The Woman,” but she matches wits with him rather than trying to seduce him. Laurie R. King, in her Mary Russell books, married off Holmes. And while Holmes’ companion, Dr. John Watson, does eventually marry a woman, but that hasn’t prevented generations of readers and analysts from wondering if the flatmates at 221B Baker Street are something more than heterosexual bachelors.

Sherlock, the recent BBC adaptation of the classic story, updated the events, making Watson a veteran of America’s most recent misadventure in Afghanistan—and foregrounding the sexual tension between the two. While Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) is more open about his essential asexuality, the show makes a joke of the assumption that Holmes and Watson are a couple. Whether they’re out at a restaurant or on an investigation, waiters and acquaintances of the pair keep assuming they’re on dates or an established couple. But the joke’s on them—and us—for assuming. The show isn’t actually going there, though it does have Sherlock’s nemesis, Moriarty, introduce himself in the guise of a gay man hitting on our hero, whose obliviousness keeps him from recognizing vital clues.

But the next riff on the show promises a new take on the dynamic. I don’t particularly feel we urgently need another modern update on Sherlock Holmes, but we’re getting one in the form of Elementary, which will star Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes, and in a nice twist, Lucy Liu as Watson. It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman’s played one of the roles that Conan Doyle created as a man—Watson’s granddaughter thawed out a frozen Holmes, once, and Inspector Lestrade’s been a woman. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that the original pairing’s been a man and a woman.

That means the show can do one of two things, either of which would be interesting. It can have Miller and Liu get along purely as friends, which given the dominance of slow-burn will-they-or-won’t-they cops-and-their-partners shows on television, which would be refreshing and different. We could use more solid friendships between men and women in pop culture. And if they don’t do that, Holmes and Watson can finally get it on. Bones appears to have finally broken the Moonlighting curse, proving that a will-they-or-won’t-they couple can get together without blowing up a show. So maybe we can see Holmes and Watson’s partnership go through some growth, evolving beyond its—admittedly entertaining—stasis.

On Monday, Ryan McGee laid down a marker in the AV Club, arguing that HBO’s success with shows like The Sopranos deemphasized the need to make individual episodes of television compelling as long as they served a larger narrative, and urged episodic shows to adopt at least the facade of long-arc stories even if they weren’t well-suited to do so. James Poniewozick at Time suggested that Ryan’s overstating the extent to which this has actually happened, and make a point that I think gets at a gateway that precedes Ryan’s piece. “It’s true that a TV series is not a novel,” James writes. “But it’s also not a movie. Every medium works best when it takes advantage of what’s distinctive about it. TV is linear and cumulative, allowing a story to unfold over weeks, months or years.” So what is it that makes it a distinctive medium? And how can we best nurture that?

To answer the second question first, there’s an extent to which television is the least flexible of the major media. While it’s absolutely true that the networks are becoming somewhat more flexible about season lengths—something like ABC’s found footage horror show The River is a good example of this—and cable channels and network do make miniseries, it’s true that the standard network season is 22ish episodes and the standard cable season is 13ish episodes. The episodes are of a relatively standard length: 22ish minutes for a sitcom and 42ish for a drama on the networks and non-premium cable channels, and closer to 30 and an hour on the premium cable channels.

Those are astonishing formal constraints for an artist, even a commercial one, to work under, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. Standard-release movie features features can run from 80 minutes to well over two hours, and you can make something substantially shorter or longer than that and still find mass-market distribution for it. Novels are bound by some constraints on what a publisher can physically bind, but there’s a great deal of range within those technical specifications, and within them, no one’s setting limitations on how long or short chapters have to be, or even what they’re expected to look like: David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Eagan have helped shake that up. And one can only imagine, especially given the rise of e-books that can incorporate video, graphics, or animation, that experimentation will continue. Most pop songs hover in the three-minute range, but once again, that’s not a formal constraint, and iTunes may have hurt the album but it also freed artists like Robyn from its limitations. Web television may yet shake the formal constraints of television, but we’re far from a paradigm shift. Television is the most restrictive popular art form in existence, and I’m constantly awed that people manage to fit stories neatly into the space allotted to them without too much filler or franticness. But those restrictions are more than some sort of technical exercise: this is a multi-billion dollar industry, not a writing workshop handing out a structurally tricky assignment to talented students.
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The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

Downton Abbey scored 4.2 million viewers in its return on Sunday, 1.28 million viewers more than Mad Men averaged in its most recent season and just 280,000 viewers below what Community averaged in its second season (in other words, numbers NBC would like to see again as a minimum). The numbers are cheering if only because it’s nice to see that public television can score a program that’s as compelling as network offerings, that if public broadcasting is to be the bastion of eggheads and intellectuals, that there are 4.2 million of them willing to turn out to support quality programming.

But what does it mean for what kind of slate PBS might put together? I’ve been having some trouble finding ratings for the U.S. airing of Sherlock on PBS, but it certainly seems at least like an anecdotal success. Luther got poor ratings on BBC America, which may be a product of the network’s availability as a standard part of cable packages, despite the fact that it seems like a logical crossover for those of us nostalgic for The Wire. I wonder if it might have been more successful on PBS, and helped PBS build a bit of edgy cred, as Luther is nothing if not often and significantly uncomfortable. I do think it’s a challenge for PBS, both in terms of its public support and building a broader audience long-term, to be seen as too British. But how awesome would a drama block that starts with Downton, continues to Sherlock, and ends with Luther be?

Those of us who have fallen for Benedict Cumberbatch, whether via the good graces of Sherlock or through some other exposure will be pleased to learn that in a bit of surprise casting, he’s to play the villain in the new Star Trek movie. I’ll be curious to see what that means for the tone of the conflict between Kirk and whatever baddie Cumberbatch ends up playing. Eric Bana’s Nero was a man moved to planetary destruction, to play a role in galactic affairs, by personal grief. Cumberbatch’s certainly capable of working in that key — he proved that in a few key, touching scenes in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the most brilliant alteration to John Le Carre’s original work. But he’s also wonderful playing cold or strange. Unlike most maniacs who populate action films, Cumberbatch has practice playing people with fully realized alternate worldviews. And that’s really the key, isn’t it? If you can’t sell the idea that you’re really convinced that nuclear war is the best way to bring about world peace or that the death of your wife and your planet gives you the right to kill as many worlds as you want, there’s not going to be any dramatic tension. Those alternate perspectives are nigh-impossible to make compelling to an audience. But I think Cumberbatch will have fun chewing some scenery and whacked-out motivations, and we’ll have a delightful time watching him.

The bridge is yours.

-May 6 will be my favorite day of 2012.

-If I was a star Japanese pitcher, looking at the available evidence, I’d probably want to stay in Japan.

-HBO GO may finally be available to all HBO subscribers.

-Time to start playing with Google Music.

-Really excited for the Star Trek sequel.