![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.e-rockford.com\/applesauce\/files\/2012\/03\/3359563_640px.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There’s a great conversation in Soapdish<\/em>, which stars Sally Fields and Whoopi Goldberg, where Goldberg, the chief writer for a soap opera, is arguing about bringing back a character who died.\u00a0 Her complaint?\u00a0 “The guy was decapitated….He doesn’t have a head!\u00a0 How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn’t have a head?”\u00a0 The producer promises to figure it out, suggesting that maybe his head was frozen and re-attached in “a two-day operation.”<\/p>\n That’s bizarre and funny, but appropriately so, since Soapdish<\/em> is a wild comedy.\u00a0\u00a0 How the writers of Sherlock<\/em> brought him<\/em> back from the dead in Season Three was ridiculous, but the show isn’t meant to be a farce.\u00a0 Unfortunately.\u00a0 So we can expect the return of Moriarity (no, he didn’t really blow his brains out) to be just as cavalierly worked out.<\/p>\n What’s happened to this show?\u00a0 It started out as fiendishly clever in the first season, everything you’d expect from a new take on Watson and Holmes, even playing with the homoerotic nature of their bromance–at least as seen by outsiders like their landlady.<\/p>\n But the special effects that were so diverting in that season have taken over the show and become a distraction.\u00a0 There’s much less actual story than there used to, and I’ve been wondering why that could be so.<\/p>\n Then I saw the writers on PBS jauntily, even defiantly saying that Sherlock<\/em> was not going to be about him “solving a crime ever week.”\u00a0 What’s the point, then?\u00a0 Why try breathing new life into a character with many lives in books and in film and then totally subverting what he is and does?\u00a0 Holmes is a brilliant detective.\u00a0 With a level of insight that’s almost superhuman, he observes, deduces, and detects, either in the field or just sitting in his armchair.\u00a0 But the writers are apparently bored by all that, and prefer playing with toys instead.\u00a0 Their attitude shows contempt for the genre they’re in.<\/p>\n Elementary<\/em> with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu fields an even bolder take on Holmes, not just making him a recovering addict but turning Watson into a woman and his “sober companion” when the show debuted.\u00a0 There’s no flashy camera work or FX to the show, but plenty of substance, and crimes are solved, not ignored.\u00a0 It’s the real deal.\u00a0 A smart, engaging, contemporary update of Holmes, it never loses sight of who Sherlock is and why he’s held our imagination for over a century.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a great conversation in Soapdish, which stars Sally Fields and Whoopi Goldberg, where Goldberg, the chief writer for a soap opera, is arguing about bringing back a character who died.\u00a0 Her complaint?\u00a0 “The guy was decapitated….He doesn’t have a head!\u00a0 How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn’t have a head?”\u00a0 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,51],"tags":[67,65,64,66],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-to-film","category-edwardian-fiction","tag-elementary","tag-sherlock","tag-sherlock-holmes","tag-watson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}