There's a lovely scene in Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings that addresses that. The book is about a group of minor league baseball players in Georgia during World War II, and one of them takes offense to how The Bride of Frankenstein gets all the details wrong.
On the issue of copyright infringement, Warner Bros pulled the plug on Quean (which it was making for CBS) because of legal threats from Sony, on the basis that it is too similar to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I wonder if this might doom Elemetary, too? Quean was making efforts to change the location, race and gender of characters, and apparently that didn't keep the lawyers at bay: CBS has a successful lineup and little need to stick its neck out just for one pilot that probably won't even survive the vicious culling process in May. However, to put this in perspective, it would be more of a case of a corporation not wanting the bother and expense of legal trouble than any real departure from the well established practice of borrowing from everything and anything: I actually like the premise of The Selection, and I'm looking forward to that. I hope that one isn't affected by any of this.
http://www.deadline.com/2012/03/aid...entary-descendants-amara-miller-in-1600-penn/ Another encouraging bit of casting - Aidan Quinn has joined the cast as the chief of police. However, this seems to be an original character called Gregson. No Lestrade then?
Nancy scared the shit out of him this season in weeds. Just because he was a billionaire industrialist he thought that slumming it with a secretary might be fun. Poor Aiden. They were going to burn you.
Lestrade isn't in every story in the Canon. He's only in less than a quarter of the stories. Gregson appears four times (a third of Lestrade's apperances), and Hopkins appears thrice.
^ Oh, I didn't realise that Gregson was from the original novels. I thought he was a new character. Still strikes me as odd that they'd have him rather than Lestrade but perhaps they'll cast Lestrade soon too.
Gregson is one of the few Scotland Yard inspectors for whom Holmes has any regard; Holmes calls him "the smartest of the Scotland Yarders" in A Study in Scarlet. The other notable Scotland Yard inspector for whom Holmes has any respect is Stanley Hopkins, but he doesn't appear until late in the Canon. Holmes has almost no respect for Lestrade, but Lestrade is a too thick to realize it. (See "The Six Napoleons.")
which actually goes to show that there are is plenty of Sherlock canon for this show to "explore" without stealing from the BBC TV series.
Yeah, but Quean (which I'd never heard of till that report came out) isn't based on a widely known concept that many assume is in the public domain (as the makers of TNG found out was not the case). Elementary is a new version of an established story without changing names, etc. Same as if two competing Frankenstein or Dracula series were created. I can't see there being any legal recourse for the BBC, anymore than for the makers of the Downey movie. It's not the same scenario than if, say, a US network commissioned a TV series about a British secret agent named James Gunn Agent 666 who has a license to kill and who travels the world womanizing and killing off supervillians. Eon Productions, owners of James Bond, would take umbrage. And the descriptions I've read about Quean offer the same kind of similarities with the Girl movies, so the legal whip cracking is not surprising. I was expecting to see the same thing happen with The Hunger Games, which is almost identical in concept to Battle Royale, but the powers that be have made it clear the similarities were coincidental, so last I heard the Japanese rights holders of Battle Royale haven't been making any noises. Yet. We'll wait and see if Hunger Games enters the $500 million club or not. Alex
Exactly. It's not like any of the new versions invented Holmes and Watson, or even the idea of setting them in the present-day.
I don't think the BBC has any valid case here, either. But a corporation doesn't need to have a good legal case in order to make trouble. All they need is money to pay their lawyers and the will to pursue legal action. They can make enough trouble to shut down a production simply because nobody wants the headache of dealing with that shit. So this is less about whether the BBC has a valid case than whether they have the resources to make as much trouble as Sony could have. That's what I find doubtful. However, CBS has just renewed a ton of shows, and they have a fair number of pilots in contention, which means any single pilot is going to have a big uphill battle to get a series order. If the BBC made any trouble at all, that could be enough to get CBS to pass over Elementary in favor of something that won't be any legal bother at all.
Because the script writers are absolutely terrified of homosexual tension. Mark my words, Holmes is going to 'do' Watson
If only they'd put this on the CW! Then the hoyay would not only be necessary but mandatory! Of course Holmes and Watson would look like the Salvatore Brothers, but you can't have everything. Hmm, there's a thought...what if they were brothers?
Hmm... Well I guess it's possible that this isn't his Sherlock outfit, and is just Miller's regular clothes, and I guess there's only so many different looks for a guy, but still if you were trying to distance yourselves from accusations of ripping off the BBC, would you really dress your guy that much like Cumberbatch?
^ I don't know if it's all that similar. Cumberbatch's distinctive coat is a lot longer. The scarf is a bit reminiscent, I suppose, but a lot of guys wear scarves.
Oh I know it's a bit of a stretch, but given the BBC were already making noises, don't you think it might have been prudent to avoid any similarities, and whilst lots of blokes wear a scarf, they don't neccesarily all wear them the same way.