Plan B Forum

Sherlock is a co-production of the British network BBC and the American station WGBH Boston for its Masterpiece anthology series on PBS.

Lord Jim wrote:
The first two sets of episodes were really the placing of classic Sherlock Holmes stories in a modern setting...

This one was not....It was much broader...

I suspect there's a reason for this...

My suspicion is that just as Johnny Lee Miller's Elementary would not have made it to the screen had it not been for Cumberbatch's Sherlock...the writers of Sherlock are now being influnced by the success of Elementary...

So to Strop our "faithful to the cannon" purists, I ask:

You didn't like a wealthy father being introduced to the story and saw that as a violation of faithfulness to the stories...

How do you feel about the introduction of two comical middle class geezers as Holmes' parents?....

You didn't like a female Watson....

How about a Watson who marries a woman, (carrying his child) who turns out to be a Ninja clad East European proffesional assassin?

Don't recall reading anything about that in the original stories....

(Or perhaps that one is based on the little known Conan Doyle story, The Case Of Watson's Peculiar Wife...)

Now personally I enjoyed all of that, but I imagine a Purist would be appalled...

After the first two installments, the show got campier and less devoted to "the cannon". The success of Elementary no doubt played a role in this, (as did Stephen Moffat's understanding of how to play for a larger commercial audience. )

Also to get Cumberbatch and Freeman (who have become big-time Hollywood types) to come back and reprise these roles for BBC wages, they probably had to broaden the appeal...