Seeing the posters around New York had been vaguely depressing: Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson in the new CBS series Elementary. The casting seemed obnoxious, not just for Watson-as-a-lady but for Miller, an actor not wholly rehabilitated from his association with the Sadie Frost-Jude Law Primrose Hill mafia of the mid-1990s and with a permanently petulant look on his face.
The idea of Lucy Liu, meanwhile, riled the purists as much for Americanizing as for feminizing Watson, particularly after the recent failure of another Scotland Yard to NYPD transplant, Prime Suspect. For sheer wrongness, it'd take the BBC casting Nigel Havers in a remake of Columbo to even begin to get back at the Americans.
The set-up for the show sounded tortuous, too: Miller's Sherlock Holmes is a modern-day Londoner living in New York, fresh out of rehab and acting as a "consultant" to the NYPD. Watson is a former surgeon kicked out of medicine after a malpractice suit and employed as Holmes' full-time sponsor by his wealthy father. They live together in an adorable brownstone and skip around town solving crimes.
It shouldn't work, it really shouldn't. But on the evidence of the first two shows – the third airs on Thursday night – it is one of the best things on network TV.
READ MORE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/elementary-cbs-jonny-lee-miller
No comments:
Post a Comment