Watched: Elementary, Season One
In the CBS adaptation - one that strays a lot further from the source material than its BBC equivalent, and quickly grows into an altogether different beast - Sherlock Holmes is an ex-addict, allowing his thirst for new cases to substitute his need for heroin. The thrill of the chase often gets in the way of Sherlock’s ability to emote, and watching the show can be like living his life vicariously at times. I watched the first season of Elementary in a week, usually in the early hours of the morning after a back-wrenching, painfully dull experience in a new job that I’ll talk about some other time. I sleep through most of the day, because I usually get home at around 10:30pm and it’s strange to get back from work only to fall immediately into bed.
What Elementary provided, then, was a weirdly dissociative experience - one where I could switch off from the soullessness of a data entry job and a lot of anxiety about the future and just sink into a world filled with quips, curiously tender moments and a lot of murder. I watched 24 episodes in a little less than a week, but I also haven’t worked on my book in over a fortnight. Writing demands that I look inward. Sometimes, that isn’t the best thing.
Network dramas like this have a way of making the horrors of everyday life banal. I was addicted to Heroes when it was still on screens, and at the time was dealing with what I would later come to see as anxiety attacks and a social life that was incredibly damaged; watching that show, though, both gave the terror of growing up a glossy, fictionalised context and provided a weekly escape. Elementary revels in its complexity when it comes to cases, but the emotional beats are always deliberately familiar - there aren’t any psychological concepts in there that really require unpacking. Maybe that’s why the big villain at the end feels unfulfilling at times - ascribing love to Holmes and allowing him to call it that is bold, but without caveats it lets a little of the air out of the show.
All that said, it’s tremendously entertaining and worth losing yourself in. Now I just need to figure out what I was doing with my life before I started. Ah! Yes. Anxiety. I wondered where you’d got to.