As classic as reading Sherlock Holmes has become, it has also become tradition to recreate the story, and bring the beloved detective to light again. Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey, Jr., Ian McKellan, Benedict Cumberbatch, and many, many more have taken on the role to bring the story into more modern context. As of late, the trend has been to bring Holmes and his trusted partner, Watson, out of the Victorian context, and into the modern era, as this can be seen with both the series Sherlock, and Elementary.
Elementary even takes Holmes one step further out of his original context, by bringing the stories across the pond, and having them centered in New York City. With that, and the racebending and genderbending of Watson, I tend to see Elementary and the original Sherlock Holmes stories as being inherently different. She is brought in as a mostly different character– a woman having seen the worst as a resident surgeon, and having left practice after a fatal mistake, is now acting as a sober companion. This is extremely different from the Watson of the stories, an army surgeon looking for someone to share a flat with after coming home from deployment. The terms of their living arrangement is totally changed: instead of Watson looking for a flat to share, Joan is hired to live with Holmes as a sober companion. The point of view changes entirely, from the enamored view of Watson in the short stories, to the outside view, following the story of Holmes as he interacts with Joan.
Changing Watson’s character as they did, Elementary starts to try and reflect a more modern and diverse world. Creating Joan as a woman who not only speaks and thinks for herself, but exists as an individual outside of Holmes, starts to chip away at some of the sexism and misogyny of the original text. Even Irene Adler, who was only ever a character through Holmes, takes on her own agency. Instead of an opera singer who blackmails German royalty, she is an art dealer turned master forger, who refuses Holmes advances to start. She created her own terms to start the relationship and, in the end, creates her own terms to end it, as well.
Despite losing this smitten narrative from Watson, and the Victorian context, these two story lines are inevitably similar, as they have to be. Holmes is still and addict, to both substances, and solving crimes at whatever the cost. One can see in plenty of episodes Holmes insatiable curiosity, in how he continues to try and figure out Joan, and how he continues, in his boredom, to experiment on his pet tortoise, Clyde. Joan Watson is still the grounding factor, ever intwined in Holmes’ life, fascinated by how he works. She even goes forward, as the Conan Doyle version of Watson did, to work her own cases as a private detective. The two different versions of the classic criminal mystery stories, as told and solved by Watson and Holmes, stay essentially the same. But, through the modernisation of the roles of Joan Watson and Irene Adler, and the change in time and place, the underlying narratives are thoroughly different.
It is interesting that Holmes is still an addict in terms of substances as I believe he can be seen as an addict to solving crimes as well. Throughout the stories he treats the cases as intriguing little problems, ways to stave off his ennui, as he puts in The Red-headed League (Arthur Conon Doyle, 38). This demeans the gravity of the situations at hand and of the victims pain. Yet if they were so uninteresting to him, why would he continue to solve them unless he also had an addiction to solving crimes? Is it the joy he gains from aiding the innocent or the thrill of demonstrating the great powers of his brain- is there an intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to his deductions?
Not only does Elementary alter the narrative of the white, educated male, it creates a shift from the Britain-centralized story. Joan Watson is a Chinese-American woman, and as Hallie mentions in her post “Race and Gender Re-imagined with Lucy Liu” the Chinese and other “foreign” people are always villains in the BBC series. Dr. Watson has been everything from a robot (Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century – 1999) to a mouse (The Great Mouse Detective – 1986), but this is the first time the character has been portrayed as anything other than a white man.