In 2012, the cable network CBS introduced the world to a new Sherlock Holmes. And he was going stateside.
Set in the present day, Elementary places Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) in New York City where Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) is initially employed as his sober companion after his recent release from rehab. When friendship sparks, Watson leaves behind her career and the two continue their companionship as consulting detectives. It’s worth the watch for the weekly mysteries alone, but what the series accomplishes in its portrayal of Holmes and Watson’s dynamic secures it as one of the great adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.
Keeping track of every Holmesian adaptation, whether they are by the book or bend the canon enough to nearly snap, is an exercise in juggling. Every few years, I am prepared for a relitigation of what it means to be a “good” adaptation. In these conversations, I’ve grown to expect the tendency to overlook Elementary almost entirely in appraisals of the most adapted character in history. At most, Elementary garners an honorable—or, more often, begrudging—mention. With seven seasons and over 140 episodes under its belt, the series is the longest consecutively run adaptation of Sherlock Holmes ever. It’s beloved among its viewers. Yet, it is often relegated to a blip in the century of screen adaptations. So what gives?
Back in 2012, I was an undergraduate rummaging through secondhand bookshops in Chicago. I was looking for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, having barreled through Conan Doyle’s 56 short stories and four novels. I picked up Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. I watched Jeremy Brett’s gripping performance in the iconic Granada Television series. I bought a DVD set of Basil Rathbone’s film series. I still was hungry for more. Naturally, when Elementary hit the silver screen I was ecstatic. CBS’s announcement, however, sparked what I might gently term “debate” in Holmesian circles. Hubbub surrounding Elementary largely fell into two camps: tentative excitement and preemptive criticism ranging from doubt to forthright disdain. Another Sherlock Holmes? Did the world really need another rude genius, especially in an American procedural drama?
Much of the initial criticism leveled at Elementary centered on the accusation that the series was the United States’s cheap ploy to profit off of BBC Sherlock’s success. The latter series was rapidly gaining momentum among American audiences, but its gaps between seasons were long and unpredictable. When CBS was unable to obtain rights to the British series, Elementary was born. Sherlock fans were understandably wary, fueled by the BBC series’ creators who threatened to sue. When Lucy Liu was cast as Watson, backlash was heated and often tinged with misogyny and racism. Among some of Elementary’s critics, casting an Asian-American actress in the role of Watson was considered further evidence of the series’ attempt to proffer a superficial distinction from its British parallel. But those interpretations (many of which were lobbed before the first episode aired), turned out to be inconsistent with where the series went throughout its seven years.
Before Elementary came along to elasticize the very notion of a Holmesian adaptation, films like the cult classic The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), the 1976 adaptation of Meyers’s aforementioned pastiche, and Laurie R. King’s novel The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994) all sought the spaces between Conan Doyle’s words. Their premises explore different aspects of Holmes’s personality and his relationship with Watson while grounding them within the familiar mystery plot. Elementary continues this long tradition to more extensive ends. By unmooring Holmes from his traditional setting, the series examines what makes the character tick. Elementary is an exercise in transformative adaptation. It at once contests the canon and distills the audience’s long standing love affair with Conan Doyle’s characters. In short, Elementary succeeds as an adaptation not because it attempts to be faithful to his plots but because it understands why we never tire of the great detective and his good doctor in the first place.
Over the course of the first season, a volatile Holmes attempts to reconstruct his life in the Big Apple. By his side is the steadfast Joan Watson. Elementary’s master stroke is its portrayal of this partnership and its striking development through the series. When we meet Watson, she’s almost as lost as Holmes: a surgeon-cum-sober companion, she doesn’t especially relish her career, but she’s committed to helping others. Although their fledgling relationship starts on rocky ground, it organically evolves into a beautifully devoted friendship. When Holmes offers Watson to train her as a detective, he proposes that she leave behind sober companionship for a partnership of equals.
Too often reduced to a gimmick, Elementary’s decision to cast a woman as Watson is instead an incisive excavation of Holmes’s canonical misogyny. In Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Watson characterizes Holmes’s relationship to women as an “aversion.” This isn’t just Watson adding color to his friend’s personality. In “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” Holmes dismisses women as flighty: “And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable . . . Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.” Indeed, Irene Adler, the one-off darling of Holmes enthusiasts, stands apart not solely for her ability to best him but also for the narrative condemnation of Holmes’s assumptions regarding women’s intelligence.
Of course, Elementary isn’t the first adaptation to examine Holmes’s misogyny, but it is the first to position a female Watson as a deliberate rebuttal. While “misogynistic” is too strong a term for Miller’s Holmes, he is arrogant and condescending. Liu’s casting begets an open-ended question: What happens when the person Sherlock Holmes cares about most happens to be a woman? As the series continues, the questions pile up. Moriarty, the nefarious inverse of Holmes’s proverbial coin, is also revealed to be a woman. Kitty Winter, whose marvelous arc in season three extrapolates from “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” while maintaining its vengeful roots, becomes chosen family. These three women in particular further operate as implicit critiques of contemporaneous Holmeses, who are too often bombastic and verging on callous. Miller’s perception of Holmes as a “much more understanding guy” aside, these characters are integral to his development into a rounded person capable of change. Women surround Holmes in Elementary. They also are the people who challenge him the most and toward whom he feels the strongest—though varied—pull. Elementary asks how foregrounding women upsets what we love most about the Sherlock Holmes stories. Its answer is simple and revelatory: it doesn’t.
Lucy Liu’s Watson is the series’ de facto protagonist. In an apt reinvention of Watson’s function as narrator, Elementary’s Watson is the audience surrogate. A seemingly average Joe (or, in this case, Joan), she guides us into Holmes’s strange world and discovers, to her surprise, she fits in. She, in fact, excels in it. A casting that, to some, appeared to be a second-rate novelty quickly revealed itself to be vital to the series. Liu’s ability to mine the depths of her character is a treat to watch—it is the struggle of a woman coming into her own who, as Miller’s Holmes says, “make[s] an effort to appear conventional,” but shares his “love of all that is bizarre and outside the humdrum routine of ordinary life.”
Because of its longevity, Elementary offers what many other adaptations cannot: an artfully drawn evolution of Holmes and Watson’s friendship. Most often, we are dropped in media res or otherwise must implement our familiarity with the canon to sustain a thorough conceptualization of that relationship. Even the canon falls short in this regard. In Elementary, we witness their daily rituals as mystery swirls around them. We are privy to their personal lives and the people who move in and out of their world. Elementary has the time to portray it all, including the many satisfying easter eggs for canon enthusiasts. By the series finale, the progression of their partnership reads as a love letter to one of the most celebrated friendships in literature. As Elementary’s Holmes remarks after Watson invokes their partnership in the season six finale, “We’re much better than that. We’re two people who love each other. We always have been.”
The question of a faithful adaptation is folly. And why shouldn’t it be? Arthur Conan Doyle famously reviled his creation. In a testament to Holmes’s popularity, however, he couldn’t keep the detective down even after dashing him into a watery grave. He resurfaced then and continues to do so. No doubt, there will be many more Holmeses before the world tires of him. Series like Elementary and, more recently, Miss Sherlock take liberties, certainly, but in doing so they prove the broad spectrum of adaptations will find their audience as long as they attend to the heart of the stories. An almost ineffable quality is imperative to a worthwhile Holmesian adaptation. As it turns out, it’s neither London nor the nineteenth century that keeps us coming back for more.
Give me a cozy abode. Put inside it a clever detective and a resilient doctor. Build them a partnership predicated on love for the other and the thrill of adventure in its heart. Everything else falls away.
