Penguin on the Telly

All right, internet, listen up!  The BBC is where it’s at.  The signs have been coming for a while now: the campy ingenuity of “Merlin,” the plethora of great Ricky Gervais creations, the ever-growing popularity of the new series of “Doctor Who.”

The final straw came this summer when this blogger’s favorite TV writer, Doris Egan, abandoned her role as a lead storyteller over at “House” to join up with Russell T. Davies to bring the world more “Torchwood,” a British spinoff show shot in Wales that is, for lack of a better metaphor, the slutty little brother of the aforementioned “Doctor Who.”  It was then I knew the world as we know it— and by we I mean myopic (but passionate!) American fans of American television— was ending.

But even I, anglophile that I am, could not have predicted the massive gift to television (and, frankly, to the Internet) that was the BBC’s “Sherlock,” a three-episode miniseries that updated the Sherlock Holmes canon for the twenty-first century.  Airing in late July and early August, the series was created by genius duo Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, two writers who currently write for (surprise, surprise) “Doctor Who.”  There must be something in the water over there.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the folks behind this bloody brilliant work of fannish love (make no mistake, the creators are Sherlock Holmes fans with a capital F) didn’t know how massively successful it was going to be.  The show got 7 million viewers its first episode.  The entire UK has a population of 61 million people.  That’s a little like a show here getting 50 million viewers: unheard of.  For the entire year, “Sherlock” came in second in “viewer appreciaion,” something they somehow manage to rank over in that ever-more enlightened country of theirs.  No new show in the US gets that kind of love straight out of the gate.

Which is a long and rather dry way of me trying to tell you that if you are a Fan of TV,  if you stay up late scouring spoiler sources and writing fanfiction, this series is a present for you from People Who Understand.  No, it’s not without its problems— the second episode, “The Blind Banker,” is widely criticized as a modern example of that cultural superiority complex Britain’s colonial history can sometimes project onto her subjects’ worldview— but even in those, it is true(ish) to its source: the great, immortal body of work Sir Arthur Conan Doyle produced from the late Victorian era to the end of the Edwardian.  These stories (56 of them, along with four novellas) have inspired fan culture since before such a thing existed.  People have been writing “pastiches” of Holmes stories since before the term “fan fiction” was invented.  In the small but important academic arena of participatory media studies, it is the Sherlock Holmes canon— and the passionate following it inspires— which set the ball rolling on what we now call “fandom.”

But this isn’t a history lesson on “participatory fan culture,” though I’ve given you all the information you need to Google it yourself if you’re curious or in need of a thesis project.  This is a love letter to the BBC and an urging from someone who cares for you to go to your computer, find a way to watch this series, and stay plastered to your screen until you’ve finished all glorious four hours and twenty-nine minutes of it.  Here it is, the top three reasons you need to drop whatever it is you’re doing and watch “Sherlock”:

1.  Benedict Cumberbatch. 

            As many TV bloggers have noted already, he’s “the only man to play Sherlock Holmes with an even stupider name.”  But don’t let the sublime Englishness of his name deter you: the man is a demigod.  He rivals Jeremy Brett in his interpretation of Holmes, the most-played English-speaking character in the history of the world.  And if you already know who Brett is, you need to be watching his successor.

2.  The creators are in on the joke.

            Are you a Holmes fan?  Are you a television geek?  Either way, there will be insider-y jokes and tricks up the sleeves of your fine captains.  The people piloting this ship are experts in Holmesiana and fluent in the trends of current cinematography and effects.  Just try to get through the first scene with Detective Inspector Lestrade facing a horde of inquiring journalists all receiving text messages—visible on the screen— courtesy Sherlock Holmes and reading “Wrong!” and try not to grin.  And the old questions from Doyle’s less than consistent canon are cheekily resolved, as when the question of whether Dr. Watson’s war wound is in his shoulder or leg comes up, and we find that this John Watson’s limp is purely psychosomatic.

3.  The homoerotic overtones.

            Right away, in the first episode, the writers faced the fact that bringing Holmes and Watson into the 21st century would, shall we say, cast their “Victorian friendship”— that of two bachelors sharing a life and apartment together, on and off, for some forty years— into a contemporary light.  Their landlady— still named Mrs. Hudson, still a widow, but no longer their housekeeper— reminds them that there’s a second bedroom upstairs, “If you’ll be needing one.”  And, she adds, “Mrs. Turner next door’s got married ones!”  This is the kind of thing that is definitely lampshaded in American television, but here it’s treated with surprising gravitas— perhaps because Mark Gatiss is a gay man himself.  In fact, it takes until episode three for the characters to clarify John Watson’s sexuality, and we never hear anything conclusive about Sherlock’s, beyond that he “considers [him]self married to [his] work.”  That’s about as true to the canon as you can get. 

Finally, though this doesn’t make the top three reasons, the fan community for this show is already legendary.  Some of the most creative people online have migrated from their previous fandoms (from “Supernatural” and Harry Potter to the more likely “Who,” “Torchwood,” and older Holmes incarnations) to join up in creating all kinds of love letters to “Sherlock”: hilarious, Ke$ha-scored fanvideos, brilliant fan fictions resolving the series’ many cliffhangers; an entire macro meme.  Something about these characters and their world touches people where they live, and the result is a vibrant new playground where fannish folks of all stripes can play.

- Hope