PILOT LIGHTS 2012: ELEMENTARY

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) is an official medical companion... she accepts formal, legal assignments to watch recovering drug addicts and substance abusers. She stays with them, lives in their houses if necessary and makes sure they stay on the straight and narrow.  Her latest charge was due to leave a rehabilitation facility today, but apparently he just escaped. His name is Sherlock Holmes... and he could be the hardest case of her career.

When she tracks him down, Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) immediately shows his disdain for the court order and father's instructions concerning his 'supervision' while he stays in New York City. Sherlock scrutinises Watson, correctly deduces some of the key points of her troubled personal history and then they are whisked off to help a local Police Captain (Tobias Gregson played by Aidan Quinn) who originally crossed paths with Holmes while '...under secondment to Scotland Yard'.  He has a particularly puzzling murder to solve... and Holmes now has some motivation. 

On the face of it, it's no wonder that Steven Moffat tactfully declared he'd be 'scrutinising' CBS's Elementary with interest. After all, Moffat was one of the team who brought the amazingly successful Sherlock to the screen for the BBC. He wasn't the first person to tool a contemporary variation on the famous fictional detective's exploits but it was done in a way that was visually stylish, cleverly plotted and, importantly, honoured the original material. The benchmark was set high. 

When CBS announced Elementary, Moffat wasn't the only one with a quizzical look. There's 'jumping on the bandwagon' and there's casually attaching yourself to the bandwagon once the barn-door has been opened and the horse has bolted up the ratings.  Cynical? Perhaps, but the day-planners of schedules past are littered with the inferior carbon-copy shows that didn't make the grade and the first bist of information leaked about the show weren't promising.

Cynicism aside, the first thing that should be said is that Elementary isn't bad at all. Anyone going in expecting that CBS has merely committed some industrious industrial espionage on the BBC version can be reassured that this is a different animal, or at least a different branch of the Sherlockian family tree.  

If there's any shows that Elementary feels like, it's actually House (which, as purists will already know, was already inspired by Doyle's stories of an investigator with more insight than people-skills) with a dash of dysfunctional MONKage. However Miller's 'consulting detective' is hipper than either Laurie's difficult doctor or Cumberbatch's diffident toff... he's covered in tattoos, streetwise, appears to pass the time with ladies of the night and quite likes to show off to whatever audience he has to hand. 

The key thing here is obviously the change from 'John' Watson to 'Joan' Watson. Despite an impressive CV, I've never been a huge fan of Lucy Liu - who always seems to be doing a variation on a theme of annoyed, unsympathetic detachment devoid of any real warmth - but here she's given the opposite kind of role, the sidekick charged with humanising her charge. One suspects there was a studio-based allure of creating a sexual tension between the two lead characters but on the strength of the pilot any chemistry is of the mind rather than the physical kind -  not unlike Moffat's version, these are merely two exceptional people damaged in different ways who have a growing admiration for the other.  

No, this isn't the BBC version - in fact nothing like it,  but Elementary is trying just a little too hard to pretend it's slick and new when it's actually,simply another old formulaic concept (hero with foibles being superior to the 'system') tooled for mainstream with a coat of the hippest demographic-pleasing paint it can find. It FEELS like a British concept that's been very Americanised, as if it went through the studio machine and came out with the barest bones intact but a neat name, useful for branding. What ultimately clothes those bones is easy on the eye, kind on the ear and a diverting enough hour of light drama which should do okay in the ratings, but it also feels opportunistic, borrowing the 'Sherlock' name rather than the most compelling, clever plots.  

Perhaps it's a poisoned chalice. Too close to the original books or the BBC version and it would be charged with being unoriginal. Too different and it's not Sherlockian enough. Pretend there's no connection to Baker Street and ignore the irregularities and you'll enjoy this well enough. Miller sails through it effectively and Liu is surprisngly sympathetic but the mysteries are nowhere near as complex as they need to be to earn the brand or raise the bar. 

Yes, it's all very...elementary. But what's on elsewhere?

7/10