The Sherlock wars

Sherlock’s back — that is to says Benedict Cumberbatch is back alongside well-meaning but rightly pissed-off partner Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman) in the BBC series that has successfully rebooted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character for the 21st century. But he’s not the only Sherlock in town, of course: there’s the Robert Downey Jr. movie franchise, but it’s increasingly hard to see a rounded character behind Downey’s constant riffing and mugging. Then there is that other TV reboot starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as the crime-solving duo — Elementary — but it’s kind of like Sherlock’s dumber, less witty sibling.

By most counts, Cumberbatch is the winner of the Sherlock wars, getting major attention playing the British detective as a cold, distant analytic who gradually reveals cracks in his armor. (Conan O’Brien jokes that Cumberbatch is no longer the “sexiest British actor alive”; he’s been replaced by Brinkley Dribblesnatch, Fognacious Quatch and Lord Percival Pudgepickle.)

In Season 3 we meet up with Cumberbatch’s Sherlock in a Serbian prison, two years after leaping headfirst off an apartment building, seemingly to his death. But this couldn’t be: Sherlock Holmes dead? Fans wouldn’t stand for it.

Conceived by Doctor Who veterans Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the new Sherlock delivers hyperkinetic thrills. Text messages are spelled out onscreen; data from Sherlock’s brainpan likewise streams there when he goes to his “mind palace” to retrieve facts. Fan boys of the original Doyle stories — as well as acutely aware of fan noise — writer Gatiss and Moffat had to get on with the business of raising Sherlock from the dead in the digital age. It’s a time and place where no plot thread goes unexamined online, no gesture or inconsistency goes untweezed or untweeted. Fans can be a real pain in the arse, and Moffat/Gatiss plunge into the new season with this fact in mind. Everybody on the streets of London’s got an opinion: How did Sherlock fake his own death? The pulse-racing Mission: Impossible opening of episode one is just a classic bit of misdirection; it’s a fan boy’s dream of how the Baker Street detective elaborately skin-grafted his own mask onto the corpse of nemesis Moriarty (Andrew Scott) before tossing his body off the roof. (Another fan version suggests Sherlock and Moriarty are lovers, playing games to fool the public.) All this is wry commentary, Moffat admits, on the overwhelming online input from fans who keep suggesting plot turns and twists. Moffat, in a New York Times interview, insists he doesn’t want the tail to wag the dog, à la Lost: he and Gatiss are amused by all the fan interest, but they take away zero in terms of writing the next series.

Which is good, because Sherlock, by Season 3, has already covered the postmodern angles of a Victorian-era detective plunked down in modern London like a keen-eyed fish out of water. He’s still wearing his longcoat, and occasionally his hunting hat, but is just as quick to suss out every available detail in a room with remarkable clarity (except when he’s drunk). Freeman, playing Watson, gets on with his own life a little bit, living apart from Holmes, getting married, thus quashing the modern-day gay rumors. And the new season is allowed to proceed along the levels of character, mystery and writing, as though the fan boy chatter doesn’t exist. Plus there are more playful jabs at the mystery genre and its expectations than both previous seasons combined. With only three 90-minute episodes per season, you could say the show is hitting its stride. 

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The fish-out-of-water detective is nothing new; it’s one of the oldest species in the sea. Think back to Oedipus Rex, its flummoxed hero digging around for clues, or more recently 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, with black detective Sydney Poitier set down in Mississippi to solve a murder case with racist cop partner Carroll O’Connor. Look at Se7en, with its odd pairing of Brad Pitt and symbol-obsessed Morgan Freeman, after a deadly sins-inspired serial killer (Kevin Spacey). On HBO this season, we are offered True Detective, a new series that pairs unlikely duo Matthew McConaughey (who’s everywhere these days) with Woody Harrelson. Well, on the surface, you’ve got two good old boys in Louisiana, called back in to solve a serial killer case that was declared closed seven years ago. There’s the nude girl with deer antlers and arcane markings, the strange twig sculptures, the usual voodoo vibe.

But one of these things is not like the other. They’re not exactly Holmes and Watson, but they are the archetypal odd couple. Harrelson is Detective Martin Hart, an ordinary, happy-go-lucky married cop who cheats on his wife with, among others, free spirit Alexandra Daddario. McConaughey is Detective Rustin (“Rust”) Cohle, a spooky partner who pieces together symbols and spouts doom-and-gloom assessments of the world until his partner tells him the inside of their car is a “no talking” zone. Harrelson and McConaughey are a good match, and there’s plenty of room in Nic Pizzolato’s sprawling storyline to examine the American south, the nature of law enforcement, religion, prostitution and corruption, not to mention the more existential matters raised by Cohle.

If it seems like we’re experiencing a glut of serial killer series on TV, well, maybe it’s just the times we live in. Shows like CSI brought a keener focus to the detective procedural (at least until the show franchised itself into oblivion), shows like Dexter posited the serial killer as the good guy, and imported fare such as The Killing and Top of the Lake brought an edgier Euro- and Kiwi-flavored tang to the detective show. Weird local details turn out to be interesting to viewers, but there’s probably a point where people reach serial killer fatigue.

True Detective seems to be off to a good start, though. By episode 3, Cohle’s philosophizing starts to grow on you; and with music by T Bone Burnett, requisite amounts of HBO (female) nudity and enough bristling sparks between its two leads, it could perhaps give Sherlock a low-key run for its money. We’ll see.