If you’ve been on social media or have had any form of contact with an anglophile in the last two months, you’ve probably heard about “Sherlock,” BBC’s modern adaptation of the much beloved detective series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this version, Sherlock Holmes is still a “consulting detective” for Scotland Yard. He lives at 221B Baker Street with his friend and investigative partner, Dr. John Watson, a former surgeon of the British Army and a veteran of Afghanistan. Yet the brilliant twist of this adaptation is the way the writers have turned the show into a love letter to contemporary London.
Holmes uses elements of modern technology to aid in his investigations, including texting and online chat rooms. While Conan Doyle’s Watson was the narrator of most of the original novels, this Watson writes a blog cataloging his and Holmes’s adventures (the blog, by the way, actually exists, and viewers can read various characters’ comments to experience their interactions between episodes). The cinematography highlights London’s best-known landmarks, including the London Eye, Big Ben, and, of course, the red telephone booths.
The show was created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, both of whom had previously forayed into television adaptations of Victorian literature. The show was originally written as a BBC miniseries comprised of six 60-minute episodes, but when the first pilot was rumored to be disastrous, the network had it restructured into three 90-minute episodes in an effort to minimize its losses. Boy, were they wrong about that.
“Sherlock” was immediately met with fantastic ratings and reviews; it’s now the UK’s most-watched drama series in over 10 years. The show just finished its third season, and the writers have announced tentative plans for at least two more. There is, of course, no shortage of Conan Doyle fans ready and waiting to analyze the show’s use of canon and “fanon,” a term used in the fan fiction community to describe commonly accepted premises hat are not yet expressed in the canonical works.
After all, in Sherlock Holmes fandom, fanon is canon. Just look at the first episode of the latest season. In the previous season’s finale, Holmes fakes his own death, a plot device from the original novels that has been repeated in various adaptations. However, the question of just how he faked his death has always been open to interpretation. During the painfully drawn-out, two-year hiatus between seasons, fans and fanfiction writers theorized and agonized about this mysterious feat. In what feels like a casual wink to the audience, the third season premiere shows a group of conspiracy theorists who believe that Holmes is still alive and are discussing how they think he did it.
Alas, the third season is already over. Still, this won’t stop your more passionate friends from rewatching, obsessing over, and excessively blogging about it. For those readers in “Sherlock” withdrawal, there is plenty of fan-made art and fan fiction to carry you through this hiatus (which is now confirmed to end on Christmas 2014, bless the BBC).
If you haven’t seen “Sherlock” yet, I highly recommend you drop everything you’re doing and watch it this instant. The first two seasons are on Netflix (I’ll leave it to you to decide how to watch the third), and with three 90-minute episodes per season, it is built for binge-watching. For the math-challenged readers out there, that makes 13.5 hours of everyone’s favorite consulting detective, so hurry up and watch it all before your professors start assigning homework!