Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the good things about the long, two-year gap between Sherlock 's second and third seasons (aside from the fact that in it we discovered Elementary , and suddenly Sherlock and its flaws seemed a lot less important) is that in that time the mainstream conversation about the show shifted from a tug-of-war between near-ecstatic praise and near-total denigration to a more universal acceptance of the show's massive flaws--which leaves more space to acknowledge its good qualities.  (This shift, I suspect, has a lot to do with the increasingly fatigued reactions to Stephen Moffat's work on Doctor Who ; it's easier to see the same flaws occurring in Sherlock when you've already cataloged them on a show that is more blatantly running out of steam.)  If you're a fan of pop culture criticism, this is a bonanza; fewer people are attacking or defending the show, and more are considering it more deeply, and from different angles.  I've collected a few interesting ...

As the 2014 Sherlock extravaganza draws to a close, let's pause and reflect on a single moment.  The star of the show is buttonholed.  In front of an expectant audience, he's asked to read words not of his own composition.  Words of an emotional, overheated nature.  Words that might be considered embarrassing.  Great merriment is had, both at his embarrassment and discomfort, and at the silliness of what he's saying in those plummy, aristocratic tones. I could, of course, be talking about the by-now infamous incident at the BFI preview event for Sherlock 's third season, in which Times columnist Caitlin Moran asked Benedict Cumberbatch (and Martin Freeman) to read an explicit Sherlock/John fanfic out loud.  But just as easily, I could be talking about an incident from the third season itself.  In the season's middle episode "The Sign of Three," Sherlock, acting as John Watson's best man at his wedding to Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington), has the tas...

A week or so ago, the US broadcast networks announced their lineup of new and returning shows for the fall of 2013, and since then the internet's premier TV sites have been abuzz with a flurry of analysis.  Trailers have been dissected, ratings and demographics calculated, schedules critiqued.  It's all a lot of fun, in an inside baseball sort of way, but in the midst of all this excitement, it's good to be reminded that in the end, nobody really knows anything.  Exhibit A: Elementary , a show that had absolutely no business being any good whatsoever.  On paper, it seems to epitomize all the worst failings of network TV, the kind that make us TV snobs sigh and complain that everything would be better on HBO.  Its genre is arguably the most overexposed, and dramatically inert, on TV, the procedural, and what's more, it's a procedural featuring a quirky, irascible detective surrounded by put-upon enablers, of which we've had far too many over the last decade....

Well, that was a long week and a half of new TV, and with not much to show for it in the end.  These write-ups represent a small minority of the new shows to premiere this fall--I haven't said anything about the season's new comedies, which run the gamut from terrible ( Partners ), to underwhelming ( Ben and Kate , The Mindy Project ), to competent but uninspiring ( Go On , Animal Practice ) , to bizarre Alf retreads ( The Neighbors ).  There are some more new shows premiering later this month, but so far I'm not very enthusiastic about this new crop of shows. Vegas - The premise of this show, which follows the (presumably fictionalized) exploits of legendary Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb (Dennis Quaid) in the early 60s, marks it as yet another attempt, after the failure of last year's Pan Am and The Playboy Club , to crack the Mad Men code for a network audience (only this time without pesky women running around all over the place--there is only one woman in the ...

Two seasons into its run, I'm having trouble deciding whether Sherlock is a brilliant show or a terrible one.  The episodes themselves seem to alternate between the two extremes, with little in the way of middle ground--devastatingly clever updates on Sherlock Holmes tropes alongside plots so full of holes that they barely hold together, gags that make you gasp with laughter alongside lines so leaden and overwrought that you hardly know where to look, characters you fall in love with in a single scene alongside one-dimensional harpies.  My reaction to these episodes is similarly bi-polar--sometimes the credits roll on what seems like a perfect story, but thirty seconds later the whole thing has collapsed into a pile of contradictions, implausibilities, and contrivances; other times, you switch off an execrable story and the only thing that sticks in your mind is that one hilarious scene.  When writing about Sherlock , I invariably find myself making laundry lists of its ...

Happy 5771, everyone!  Let the year and its reading end; let the year and its reading begin. Stone's Fall by Iain Pears - It's been nearly a decade since Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost blew me away, and during that period I experienced some disappointment trying to recreate to experience with his follow-up novels.  You can't help but respect Pears for moving away from such a successful formula and trying new things, but neither the meditative but opaque The Dream of Scipio , nor the brief but overdone The Portrait (some thoughts here ) delivered the punch that Fingerpost did--a richly detailed historical mystery that both immersed its readers in its characters' pre-modern viewpoint and encouraged us to question it.  Pears's latest novel, Stone's Fall , suggested a return to form.  Beginning in 1909, its first part is narrated by journalist Matthew Braddock, who is hired by the widow of a just-deceased industrialist, John Stone, to discover the w...