Following his fall from grace in London and a stint in rehab, a modern Sherlock Holmes relocates to New York, where his wealthy father insists he live with a sober companion, Dr Joan Watson. Holmes resumes his work as a consultant to the NYPD, and Watson becomes his student, his partner and eventually one of the city’s sharpest investigators. This is a contemporary, character-led take on Conan Doyle’s detective, built around an unusually warm and platonic partnership.
Elementary is an American crime drama created by Robert Doherty for CBS. It ran for seven seasons and 154 episodes, from 27 September 2012 to 15 August 2019. Jonny Lee Miller stars as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson, with Aidan Quinn as Captain Thomas Gregson and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell. The pilot was directed by Michael Cuesta (Homeland, Dexter), and the casting of Liu as a female Watson was the show’s biggest departure from the original stories.
Miller’s Holmes is brilliant, obsessive and socially abrasive, a former Scotland Yard consultant now living in a Brooklyn brownstone owned by his father. He keeps bees on its roof, and he consults for the NYPD on its hardest cases, with Captain Gregson, who worked with him in London, welcoming his help. Watson, initially hired to keep him sober, tells him none of her expertise applies to him, but their relationship grows from client and companion into partnership and friendship. She becomes a skilled investigator in her own right and, by the third season, sets up her own agency. Detective Bell, groomed as Gregson’s protégé, brings sharp intuition and formidable interrogation skills.
Each episode is a case-of-the-week procedural with a longer serialised thread running through it. Recurring characters include Holmes’s protégée Kitty Winter (Ophelia Lovibond), his father Morland Holmes (John Noble), his brother Mycroft (Rhys Ifans) and Jamie Moriarty (Natalie Dormer), reimagined as a criminal mastermind. The series treats Holmes’s recovery as continuing work rather than a solved problem, and between seasons 2 and 3 he spends eight months in Britain working for MI6.
Critics praised the pairing of Miller and Liu, with The Guardian calling them “a double act to rival Sherlock”. The show is more of a procedural than a cosy mystery, but its ensemble warmth, puzzle-solving and Holmes-and-Watson chemistry give it a large crossover audience with the genre.
Yes, just Register and you will then be able to add notes to every character. Just click/tap on the character. The notes can only be seen by you (when you are Logged In)
United States
United States
