Look, at this point I just feel sorry for Elementary. This Youtube preview has been up for about a day and has already garnered a 70% dislike rating, much of it, I suspect, from the weird parts of the BBC Sherlock fandom that have a sort of perceived need to defend… the world? their show? from another show that… almost certainly will have zero effect on it? Well, that said, it could also be from people who feel just on general principles that the show doesn’t measure up to Conan Doyle’s original “vision,” or even those who feel that a female Watson desecrates the characters of both Watson and Holmes, but if the Youtube comments comparing it to the original show and saying that Lucy Liu is a terrible Watson and that they’re just going to make her bang Holmes and then the show will be terrible (as if much of the Sherlock Holmes fandom wasn’t already about imagining a romance between the central characters) are any indication, Elementary‘s biggest problem so far is not that its first sneak peek (a tenuous basis to judge the full worth of a show to begin with) is middling, but that’s it’s being compared to one of the most tightly written shows on television right now.
Like I said, I just feel sorry for the poor thing. Yeah, I rolled my eyes at the “sometimes I hate being right” line, not only because it is an entirely unlikely Holmsian thing to say, but also because it’s like… the oldest line ever. And I also watched with much interest the scene at 2:50, of what appears to be the inevitable early moment where Holmes and Watson begin to work as a team, a moment that appears, despite the assumptions of some, to be an entirely platonic beginning to a partnership, something that I’m excited to see back on television. And I still couldn’t stop comparing the show to Sherlock in my head.
Godspeed, Elementary. I will watch your first episode for the sake of Lucy Liu, and we’ll see where we go from there.
