We have the Doctor Who gang (perhaps related to the Moriartys?) to thank for this.
Have any of our British cousins actually seen this?
I'm grabbing a copy from one of the usual sources and don't want to waste the bandwidth if it's half as bad as it sounds. :>(
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I came across it just now whilst digging through my Holmes folder and was about to delete it (and will be once uploaded.)
Go on completists...you know you have to have it.
Mark Lawson Front Row BBCR4 10-12-23 Benedict Cumberbatch.mp3
Balderdash. Pshaw. Harrumph.
To a completist, that is anathema.
I could criticize The Silence of the Lambsas a poor excuse for a musical comedy, but I don't think it would be useful or relevant. Attacking a programme not for what it contains but for what the viewer thinks it might have contained (but clearly did not) seems peculiar and unproductive to me.
I suspect that you are familiar with the argumentative style of reductio ad absurdam but have elected to ignore it to score rhetorical points.
The key element here is that the writers have elected to bastardize the characters strictly for juvenile escapist purposes. A lithe and supple Mycroft? A Holmes who charms young women? (""Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department," - SECO). A Watson who resorts to the modern equivalent of the agony columns by blogging? From these explicit mischaracterizations, a poisoned latte and an exploding Blackberry are not much of a stretch.
To suggest that there is some sort of nexus between these objections and a musical comedy version of "Silence of the Lambs" IS a stretch.
These objections are not mere cavils; they are objections to the very FORM of the work. I have no objection to "modernizing" Holmes and to placing him in the 21st century. I object to the way it was done in this series. The very personality of each of the characters was mangled into a form more "attractive" to a "hip" audience looking for escape.
I will put them in list form, so you may reply:
1. Mycroft Holmes is depicted as a lithe, supple, athletic man. That flies in the face of Canonical depiction.
2. Sherlock Holmes flirts with pretty young women. That is so egregious that even you would agree it is out of character.
3. Holmes is incapable of "discovering" the hack driver, despite repeating the question several times. If he is a "modern" Holmes, then certainly he is familiar with all the "sensational literature" (STUD), including Chesterton's Invisible Man and others of the ilk.
4. Holmes is shown beating a corpse to determine the effects of post-mortem assault. Again, as a "modern" student of criminology, he would KNOW the existing literature on the subject. This was a weak attempt to add "Canonical verisimilitude" to this work.
Those are facts.
If we look at this miniseries as just another buddy movie with a bit of detective work, a smattering of FX, a soupcon of sex and a passing reference or two to a classic, then it's not half bad escapism.
As a "modernization" of Sherlock Holmes, it's junk.
1) I wouldn't use the words "lithe" "supple" or "athletic" to describe Mycroft (I always thought "lithe" and "supple" meant the same thing), since he's hardly more active than the character in the Canon. Athletic? Really? The term I would use is "not fat". The casting of Mark Gatiss as Mycroft is hardly bucking a trend, there have been more thin Mycrofts on film than there have been fat ones - Christopher Lee, Jerome Willis, R H Thomson, Peter Jeffrey. The point of thinning him down for this version (apart from the fact that co-writer co-producer Gatiss undoubtedly wanted a part in the production) is that in the first episode we are led to believe that he might be Moriarty before his identity is revealed at the end. Had a fat man appeared, all doubt would have been eliminated at once - and to acknowledge the deviation from sacred text, it is mentioned on both his appearances that he has lost weight (the novelisation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes notes that the weight had fallen off Mycroft as the result of his gout - the film doesn't). My favourite Mycroft is Robert Morley (fat). My second favourite is Christopher Lee (thin). No, this isn't fact, just personal taste, but sharing the physical attributes of the character you are are portraying is not the be-all and end-all of authenticity. There are several actors who do not match the description of Holmes, but have given perfectly good performances. The late Maury Chaykin was nowhere near fat enough to match Rex Stout's description of Nero Wolfe, but his portrayal was, to me, more than adequate. It would be possible to cast a fat actor (say, Peter Kay) as Mycroft, but he would not be capable of giving a convincing account of his personality.
2) I genuinely don't know what this refers to - the only young female character with whom he has any sort of relationship is the lab tech at Bart's, and he's consistently callous and unfeeling in her dealings with her - the only time he pays her a compliment (episode 2, I think), it's in order to get her to allow him access to the bodies he wishes to examine. Is that the flirting? Incidentally, I recall that the Holmes of the Canon was always most charming with young ladies, his opinions of their sex notwithstanding.
3) Isn't the mention of "sensational literature" in A Study in Scarlet a reference to the crime news, rather than to detective fiction, of which he had a very low opinion? I'd be surprised if he did know Chesterton's Invisible Man.
4) Wow, this series really can't win, can it? When it deviates from the Canon it's in the wrong, when it emulates the Canon it's equally wrong. Maybe he's an empiricist, and needs to see it for himself.
I'd say that the series (with the exception of episode two, which I found weak) contains more than a bit of detective work - in fact, it highlights the deductions in a way I haven't seen in a long time in Holmes adaptations (the latter episodes of the Brett series usually deleted such moments altogether). And lastly, is there an amount that is less than a soupcon? I haven't noticed any sex in the series - even Watson's relationship with his girlfriend is non-sexual. There's more of a suggestion of sex in The Illustrious Client.
These aren't facts, these are just my opinions, and yours are greatly at odds with mine, but that's life. As to your description of the show as "junk", I can't possibly agree.
And now, back to work.
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