"Sherlock" BBC series.

[DNO]

I watched episode 1 of series two on Sunday (Scandal in Belgravia). Frankly I'd forgotten how good this show was! Excellent. Holmes and Watson are terrific. Irene Adler was impressive as well.

I was checking out the rest of this thread but I started to run into the discussion of series 2 shows. This series has just started on this side of the pond and I don't want to spoil the fun, so I stopped reading! As a Holmes fan, I certainly know how the stories will end but, as with any excellent production, it's the journey that is enjoyable, not the destination.

Anyway...a quick question for fans in the UK: why are there so few episodes in a season? Three? Seems rather brief to me.

 

[MikePotts]

Couldn't agree more. I thought "A Scandal in Belgravia" was splendid, the writers haven't missed a beat since the first series (which was also 3 episodes I think!).
Mistress Adler (as I'd be prepared to call her) was certainly ....impressive!

MP

 

[Kirk H.]

I agree too. It was great and I am looking forward to seeing the "Hound of baskerville" this week.

 

[Edward]

I watched episode 1 of series two on Sunday (Scandal in Belgravia). Frankly I'd forgotten how good this show was! Excellent. Holmes and Watson are terrific. Irene Adler was impressive as well.

I was checking out the rest of this thread but I started to run into the discussion of series 2 shows. This series has just started on this side of the pond and I don't want to spoil the fun, so I stopped reading! As a Holmes fan, I certainly know how the stories will end but, as with any excellent production, it's the journey that is enjoyable, not the destination.

For me a lot of the enjoyment is to be found in how they modernise the story while staying true to the original spirit and characters. Technological advances in the past century and a bit would certainly have surpassed some of Holmes' skills (such as recognising particular tobacco ashes)

Anyway...a quick question for fans in the UK: why are there so few episodes in a season? Three? Seems rather brief to me.

Partly to do with how long it takes to put them together - it's essentially three feature films they've made there. There also isn't the same tradition of really long series of anything over here: where the typical US sitcom runs for ten years at twenty plus episodes a season, over here it's far fewer. Blackadder, for instance, had about two dozen episodes in its entire run; six to ten half hour episodes would be quite normal for a sitcom run. It's just how things are done over here. There are a lot of drama series that are filmed in three to six parts of one hour, or the likes. I'm sure there is some historical reason for why US shows tend to have longer seasons (as opposed to run for many more years - that's an obvious one, just a cultural difference between over here where they tend more often to write things in a fixed arc, or at last to end when they decide they should and, say, a show like Friends where they keep going until the cast quit or the ratings drop), but it's just one of those things.

On a practical level, Cumberbatch and Freeman are also of limited availability for filming, both having big roles in The Hobbit.

 

[AntonAAK]

Partly to do with how long it takes to put them together - it's essentially three feature films they've made there. There also isn't the same tradition of really long series of anything over here: where the typical US sitcom runs for ten years at twenty plus episodes a season, over here it's far fewer. Blackadder, for instance, had about two dozen episodes in its entire run; six to ten half hour episodes would be quite normal for a sitcom run. It's just how things are done over here. There are a lot of drama series that are filmed in three to six parts of one hour, or the likes. I'm sure there is some historical reason for why US shows tend to have longer seasons (as opposed to run for many more years - that's an obvious one, just a cultural difference between over here where they tend more often to write things in a fixed arc, or at last to end when they decide they should and, say, a show like Friends where they keep going until the cast quit or the ratings drop), but it's just one of those things.

Our shows also tend to be personal projects by one or two writers. I'm not sure Ben Elton and Richard Curtis could have matched the volume of output of Frasier for instance. But how many people wrote for Frasier over the years?

US shows tend to have huge teams of writers overseen by the series creater (Joss Whedon, David Chase, Alan Ball etc) who might only write two or three episodes per season. It allows for the quick creation of lots of scripts with one person still having overall control over quality.

 

[Edward]

Our shows also tend to be personal projects by one or two writers. I'm not sure Ben Elton and Richard Curtis could have matched the volume of output of Frasier for instance. But how many people wrote for Frasier over the years?

US shows tend to have huge teams of writers overseen by the series creater (Joss Whedon, David Chase, Alan Ball etc) who might only write two or three episodes per season. It allows for the quick creation of lots of scripts with one person still having overall control over quality.

Yes, that's also true....

If anynoe has ever seen the British sitcom-drama Episodes, from what I understand of that world it's a really good comparator of the two different worlds. Essentially, it's a show about a married couple who have had a bit hit in the UK going out to the US to oversee the production of a US version of the show, how it changes radically owing to the different markets, and so on.

 

[DNO]

Thanks for the explanation Edward and Anton. I should've thought of the Blackadder example...I'm a huge fan (I have a cunning plan). Looking forward to their take on the Hound of the Baskervilles this Sunday.

 

[Two Types]

Mistress Adler was certainly ....impressive! MP

Indeed! She was what i would refer to as an absolute 'sauce pot' ....

 

[Feraud]

I'm a bit late to this party but caught A Scandal in Belgravia last night and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The producers did a great job of updating the series and keeping the spirit of Doyle's characters. I much preferred this episode to the terrible recent films.
Looking forward to catching up on missed episodes.

 

[vintage68]

Looking forward to catching up on missed episodes.

FYI: Sherlock Season 2 will be released on DVD here in the U.S. NEXT WEEK, May 22.

 

[Gin&Tonics]

Personally, I despise anything involving homoeroticism between Holmes and Watson, because quite frankly I feel it is a gross misinterpretation of the canon stories by modern eyes and I feel that it deeply cheapens the beautiful friendship between the two. It is a disease of our modern society, I find, that any time two male characters are depicted as having a close personal relationship, "OMG they must be gay!". Personally I feel this is just stupid. One of the worst examples of this is in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom where people are constantly writing stories about Ed and Alphonse being gay with each other (they're freakin BROTHERS, of course they have a close, loving relationship)

I makes me want to dig out my eyeballs with a friggin spoon I'm so bloody sick of seeing it. If an author wants to write a story about a couple of genuinely gay characters, fine, they can fill their boots, but for goodness sakes people quit trying to "gayify" every close male friendship in fiction.

 

[Fletch]

Isn't Mycroft supposed to be gay in the current show? His character sure taps into stereotypes.

 

[vintage68]

Isn't Mycroft supposed to be gay in the current show? His character sure taps into stereotypes.

I don't think so. I think he's just what the Brits would call a "prig", someone who is irritatingly smug and a bit of a dandy.

 

[DNO]

Personally, I despise anything involving homoeroticism between Holmes and Watson, because quite frankly I feel it is a gross misinterpretation of the canon stories by modern eyes and I feel that it deeply cheapens the beautiful friendship between the two. It is a disease of our modern society, I find, that any time two male characters are depicted as having a close personal relationship, "OMG they must be gay!". Personally I feel this is just stupid. One of the worst examples of this is in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom where people are constantly writing stories about Ed and Alphonse being gay with each other (they're freakin BROTHERS, of course they have a close, loving relationship)

I makes me want to dig out my eyeballs with a friggin spoon I'm so bloody sick of seeing it. If an author wants to write a story about a couple of genuinely gay characters, fine, they can fill their boots, but for goodness sakes people quit trying to "gayify" every close male friendship in fiction.

Hear, hear! (except maybe for the eyeballs and spoon part)

 

[Edward]

I makes me want to dig out my eyeballs with a friggin spoon I'm so bloody sick of seeing it. If an author wants to write a story about a couple of genuinely gay characters, fine, they can fill their boots, but for goodness sakes people quit trying to "gayify" every close male friendship in fiction.

I've never felt that strongly about it. It's not something by which I'm particularly offended, though it has become something of a cliché that says more about our society's heterosexual male fear of (platonic) emotional intimacy with another man than anything else. I've long regarded Holmes, among others, as being essentially asexual. I do greatly enjoy the portrayal of their relationship in this latest BBC series, in particular the fictional press therein, among others, manufacturing "gay" rumours - actually quite an astute little critique of this phenomenon. Gatiss is himself gay, so I'm sure in his own life he has a view on this too.

Isn't Mycroft supposed to be gay in the current show? His character sure taps into stereotypes.

Not on this side of the Atlantic - at least, not gay stereotypes anyhow. Those of an upper class background in England are, I find, often much less hung up on looking "a bit gay", and much less prone to equate what the rest of the world might view as effeminate with being gay. They have not as of yet done anything which would suggest to me that Mycroft is being played as gay. I don't imagine they will, either. He is simply being portrayed as a upperclass, stuffy prig. In that respect he is to some degree stereotypical (although it is a stereotype well grounded in reality).

 

[Doctor Strange]

You know, Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (a quite interesting interpretation, recommended) set in the traditional Victorian period, had characters thinking Holmes and Watson were homosexuals in 1970. So it's not like this is a new trope for Sherlock Holmes adaptations!

And alas, the fear/misunderstanding of male intimate friendships by a chunk of the population is just a fact of the world. How many stupid snickers were there about Sam and Frodo a decade ago when the LOTR films came out?

 

[Edward]

You know, Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (a quite interesting interpretation, recommended) set in the traditional Victorian period, had characters thinking Holmes and Watson were homosexuals in 1970. So it's not like this is a new trope for Sherlock Holmes adaptations!

And alas, the fear/misunderstanding of male intimate friendships by a chunk of the population is just a fact of the world. How many stupid snickers were there about Sam and Frodo a decade ago when the LOTR films came out?

Sam and Frodo were another example that sprung to mind. Of course, Tolkien's original language in the books can very easily be interpreted as some way homoerotic, but this in turn has to be set in the context that a lot of his work bears the hallmarks of his WW1 service in the trenches and the male relationships therein. I have never - and hopefully will never - been in a combat situation, but it's not difficult to imagine that in the muddy hells of Flanders, the Somme, and elsewhere, friendships were much deeper than in the comforts of our own civilian lives.

The one literature trope that really makes me shriek is the "Hamlet had an Oedipus Complex" nonsense than has been retrospectively grafted so firmly onto the prince that it is by now entirely orthodox. Mind you, I still object to the fundamental misuse of Oedipus' name in that context by Freudians who are either ignorant or have forgotten that Oedipus did not know until after he had killed his father and sired four children by his mother than either of them were in fact his parents. The various retellings of the myth give different accounts of what happens next, but commonly Jocasta (his mother) dies, and Oedipus is either blinded or blinds himself. He ends his days (whether as King or not) in shame and regret.

 

[Doctor Strange]

One has to remember that the categories and terminology of psychology in general and sexual/gender issues in particular are only around a hundred years old. Lots of behaviors existed without prejudicial names as part of human experience for thousands of years. Obviously, there were always same-sex attachments, but there weren't "homosexuals" and the associated baggage that came with the "scientific" categorizations. Or, to quote Preacher Casey in The Grapes of Wrath:

I got to thinkin' that maybe there ain't no such thing as sin. And no such thing as virtue. There's just things people do.

We live in an age where everything is a syndrome, a dysfunction, a named issue. Everything is classified and codified, and we're supposed to believe that these are eternal truths... But these categories are transient: in a hundred years, we'll likely have a quite different understanding of human nature.

 

[Chasseur]

We live in an age where everything is a syndrome, a dysfunction, a named issue. Everything is classified and codified, and we're supposed to believe that these are eternal truths... But these categories are transient: in a hundred years, we'll likely have a quite different understanding of human nature.

Well said. Off topic... but one thing that many of my students have difficulty understanding is that the labels and classification systems we make are to help us understand things and these change over time. Things from 100 or 1,000 years ago that we now classify into catagories will likely not have had that same catagory system when they were created/existed.

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

I haven't seen the series yet but I think if the go from pipe smoking to nicotine patches the little extra gayness won't make spoil the fun. In fact there are many internet memes and tumblr blog from teenage girls who LOVE to see a gay sherlock. I don't know what's their interest there but...