Spoilers WATSON: New Sherlock Holmes-based series on CBS

[Shamrock Holmes]

The 1950s American television series with Ronald Howard and Howard Marion Crawford mostly avoided the buffoonish image of Watson and portrayed him pretty faithfully, but aside from that, the idea of Watson as a buffoon dominated in popular culture until the Jeremy Brett series came along.

Which is why the Jeremy Brett series is my favourite "classic" Holmes.

Though ironically despite the Cumberbatch/Freeman version doing a good job of this aspect, it's probably my least favourite of the three "main" adaptions from that era (IMO, the Downey/Law version gets points for leaning into the more physical side of Holmes' skill than most, and Elementary gets points for taking the spirit of the characters and doing something novel and interesting with them while modernising the "core concept" more successfully than Sherlock did).

 

[Christopher]

Which is why the Jeremy Brett series is my favourite "classic" Holmes.

Unhh... Thank you for making me feel really old. I think of it as the first modern Holmes series, with the last gasp of the pre-modern version being Young Sherlock Holmes, which came out a year or so after the first Brett series but was very much an homage to the Rathbone/Bruce series, right down to the title sequence.

Though ironically despite the Cumberbatch/Freeman version doing a good job of this aspect, it's probably my least favourite of the three "main" adaptions from that era (IMO, the Downey/Law version gets points for leaning into the more physical side of Holmes' skill than most, and Elementary gets points for taking the spirit of the characters and doing something novel and interesting with them while modernising the "core concept" more successfully than Sherlock did).

Here's where I link to my 2014 Locus Online guest column comparing Sherlock and Elementary:

Christopher L. Bennett Guest Post–“The Problem with Sherlock in a Post-Elementary World”

The recent return of the BBC’s Sherlock from its long hiatus gave television audiences our first chance to see new episodes of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s modernization of Sherlock …

locusmag.com

In short, I agree with your assessment. Sherlock was too in love with its own cleverness and edginess, more flash than substance.

There was another "modern Holmes" series in that era, Japan's Miss Sherlock, a very Sherlock-inspired 8-episode series reinventing Holmes and Watson as Japanese women in modern Tokyo. I reviewed that one on my Patreon. It was interesting but flawed.