ELEMENTARY - PILOT REVIEW

There’s a modern day Sherlock Holmes hitting screens in the United States tonight, and he isn’t played by Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s the new series from CBS, Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson. Almost as soon as it was announced, we started to be inundated by people asking our opinion on the show, and we refused to be drawn, much like the producers of Sherlock, as we simply hadn’t seen it. But now we have, and while it’s clearly not related to our beloved BBC series at all, the shared DNA of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s original characters and that modern day setting and all its attendant technology demand our attention. While this isn’t so much a comparison of Elementary to Sherlock – the shows are simply too dissimilar – it’s instead an examination of it as a piece of work on its own, coupled with a look at its links to the source material.