I therefore felt a suitably dark chill of foreboding on discovering this fall that PBS' Masterpiece Mystery would be airing Sherlock, a series they airily described as "Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century." I've been a passionate lover of Holmes since adolescence—I even wrote an essay on his apartment for a literary journal. Part of the richness of the stories, for me, is the very nineteenth-century world that Holmes inhabits. So modernizing Sherlock, to my mind, was playing with (a cozy but nonetheless dangerous coal) fire.
Well, I need not have worried. Sherlock wasn't just good; it was brilliant. Benedict Cumberbatch is pitch-perfect as the contradictory and semi-sociopathic Holmes, while Mark Freeman is equally good as the doggedly loyal Watson, now a veteran of the Afghanistan wars of our own time. Good as they are, it's the writing that's the real star. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, who clearly know the original stories backwards and forewards, stick closely enough to the smallest element of Doyle's imaginings to satisfy us Sherlockians, yet also move them to modern London without a hitch. In fact, what's surprising is how utterly convincing Holmes and Watson seem as young inhabitants of a London filled with cell phones and computers, GPS and Goths. I loved almost every detail, right down to the fact that this new Watson posts his stories of Holmes through a blog...a reimagining that is both entirely modern, and entirely consistent with the spirit of the original.
When an adaptation is done this well, it does two really valuable things. First and most obviously, it introduces a classic to a whole new generation, meeting them where they are before beckoning them back into the past. Equally important, maybe, it shows existing "fans" just how rich the text they love can be. I wasn't just impressed with the folks that created this new Sherlock as I watched it; I was reminded of Conan Doyle's own gifts. Unusual psyches, unequal friendships, bumbling officials, fussy landladies, mysterious older brothers, a world filled with unbalanced people and unexpected challenges: the core of the Sherlock Holmes characters and premises he created is at once classically Victorian and completely timeless, an accomplishment to which I tip my imaginary top hat.
I'm posting this review very belatedly. But you may be able to catch the three episodes of this new Sherlock on your local PBS station, and you can also buy it (or perhaps borrow it from a library) from PBS and other vendors on DVD.
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