![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Why Sherlock Works
Oct. 24th, 2010 04:47 pmSherlock has completely eaten my brain. Part of this is pure nostalgia; I loved the Holmes stories and the Granada series when I was a child. Part of it is how well everything is done; writing, cinematography, directing are all some of the best to hit the screen in years. But I think much of my reaction is due to Moffat and Gatiss locating the heart of the program in the relationship between Holmes and Watson.
Recycling old franchises has become an entertainment industry crutch. Most fail, perhaps because they people producing them, mostly outsiders looking at the original from a purely commercial viewpoint, don't understand precisely what about the original attracts viewers. Without this understanding, they focus on the visual or trivial (resemblance to the original actors, use of catch-phrases, props or locations), rather than divining the key themes or relationships.
As fans of Arthur Conan Doyle, Moffat and Gatiss have a leg up on other reboots, and to my lasting joy, share my understanding of Sherlock and John's friendship, its integrity to the Holmes stories, and choose to center their vision on that relationship. It would have been very easy to have loaded the show down with dialogue, props or shtick that have come to symbolize Holmes and lose focus on the human drama that breathes life into the stories (or as Holmes might have regrettably put it "degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales").
Moffat and Gatiss expound on their approach in a recent interview with TV.com, in response to a suggestion by the interviewer that the new series comes off as "a buddy film of sorts":
SM: It's even not "of sorts." I really do think, as I said in the panel, that the real story of "Sherlock Holmes" is the story of the friendship, but nobody really talks about it because it's told through the medium of detective stories. It really is. You warm to those two men, who…in different ways, but they're quite difficult separately, and they adore each other, but…what's the line you're always quoting?
MG: I was just thinking that…because, of course, we're always thinking psychically. (Laughs) I've forgotten the line, but Watson persuades him to go out for a walk because nothing's happening, and he says, "We walked for the most part in silence, as befits two men who know each other intimately." It's beautiful. And then they come back, and it's, like, "You bastard, I told you!" (Laughs)
SM: (Laughs) Yeah. And there are those details throughout it. Doyle, despite what people tended to say about him, didn't do anything by accident. These are all very deliberate, cleverly written stories, albeit at the same speed. And the fact that it is a friendship is intentional, but there is that moment of total affection between them that happens once and is never repeated, and it's there for a purpose. So when Sherlock Holmes works, it's when you believe in the relationship between the two of them. Nigel Bruce departed a long way from the character of Doctor Watson in the stories, but why I absolutely believe those Rathbone / Bruce films is because they're the two best friends in the world. They actually were best friends, Rathbone and Bruce, and it's on the screen. You think, "They love each other!" Why do they live each other? Because they love each other.
I was a bit skeptical of a Holmes reboot because the first articles I read focused on what was updated--blogging, texting, using the internet. Had I read an interview like this instead, I never would have waited a month to check it out.
Recycling old franchises has become an entertainment industry crutch. Most fail, perhaps because they people producing them, mostly outsiders looking at the original from a purely commercial viewpoint, don't understand precisely what about the original attracts viewers. Without this understanding, they focus on the visual or trivial (resemblance to the original actors, use of catch-phrases, props or locations), rather than divining the key themes or relationships.
As fans of Arthur Conan Doyle, Moffat and Gatiss have a leg up on other reboots, and to my lasting joy, share my understanding of Sherlock and John's friendship, its integrity to the Holmes stories, and choose to center their vision on that relationship. It would have been very easy to have loaded the show down with dialogue, props or shtick that have come to symbolize Holmes and lose focus on the human drama that breathes life into the stories (or as Holmes might have regrettably put it "degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales").
Moffat and Gatiss expound on their approach in a recent interview with TV.com, in response to a suggestion by the interviewer that the new series comes off as "a buddy film of sorts":
SM: It's even not "of sorts." I really do think, as I said in the panel, that the real story of "Sherlock Holmes" is the story of the friendship, but nobody really talks about it because it's told through the medium of detective stories. It really is. You warm to those two men, who…in different ways, but they're quite difficult separately, and they adore each other, but…what's the line you're always quoting?
MG: I was just thinking that…because, of course, we're always thinking psychically. (Laughs) I've forgotten the line, but Watson persuades him to go out for a walk because nothing's happening, and he says, "We walked for the most part in silence, as befits two men who know each other intimately." It's beautiful. And then they come back, and it's, like, "You bastard, I told you!" (Laughs)
SM: (Laughs) Yeah. And there are those details throughout it. Doyle, despite what people tended to say about him, didn't do anything by accident. These are all very deliberate, cleverly written stories, albeit at the same speed. And the fact that it is a friendship is intentional, but there is that moment of total affection between them that happens once and is never repeated, and it's there for a purpose. So when Sherlock Holmes works, it's when you believe in the relationship between the two of them. Nigel Bruce departed a long way from the character of Doctor Watson in the stories, but why I absolutely believe those Rathbone / Bruce films is because they're the two best friends in the world. They actually were best friends, Rathbone and Bruce, and it's on the screen. You think, "They love each other!" Why do they live each other? Because they love each other.
I was a bit skeptical of a Holmes reboot because the first articles I read focused on what was updated--blogging, texting, using the internet. Had I read an interview like this instead, I never would have waited a month to check it out.
