Sherlocked

So this week I went from having seen a couple of episodes of Elementary and thought "hey, pretty good" to now I'm done with 2/3 of the first season and anticipate being completely done by the end of the week.

Smarter people than I have already started to analyze how and why this show is really interestingly feminist. Not in a Buffy or Xena "girl power" kind of way that simply takes masculine aspects of power and glues them to a female character, then steps back and says "Look! Feminism! I want cookies!" but in a remarkable, organic way that reflects that the writers of this show think that this is genuinely how gender relations should work, in balanced, usually non-problematic ways.

So I'm not gonna talk about that much. What I also love is how distanced it is from the terrible trappings of other detective/mystery procedurals. Bones, CSI, Law and Order, Castle, Criminal Minds, etc. etc. etc. This is a well-mined genre and somehow this show has already found its place in the world by being so much the same just...better.

Treatment of Gender and Relationships thereof: My very first reaction upon hearing the premise of this show was dread. They were just taking the names of the most famous detective/assistant duo in history and adding a nice little heteronormative will they/won't they subplot like Moonlighting/X-Files/Bones/Castle by genderswapping Watson. They did not. Joan and Sherlock's relationship is organically fleshed out throughout this season, slowly transforming from one of hired companion/recovering addict to one of genuine friendship- and not an inch further. There's not even the slightest hint of sexual tension or romantic interest between the two of them. It's terrible that it's remarkable that two people of opposite gender can be the major leads on the TV show and NOT end up in a romantic relationship.

Treatment of Death and Gore:  CSI and especially Bones revel in the shock value of having explicit gore and mutilated corpses. They love it. Bones begins pretty much every episode with the following scene:

Two people we won't see again in the episode are doing something (going on a hike, riding bikes, volunteering to clean up a beach, whatever). They're having an argument which causes one of them to do something without really paying attention to what they're doing. This causes them to uncover a mutilated, decayed corpse which explodes or falls on them or gets flung in every direction so that they're covered in viscera. Hahahaha gore.

Elementary doesn't linger on corpses. It rarely explicitly shows the injury and the people who are murdered are generally shown briefly and then never again. There is no morgue scene where we get their naked body laid out so we can watch them cut it open: we get Joan looking over the autopsy report a bit later if it's relevant. It acknowledges the violence, then is respectful and moves away from it.

Treatment of Criminals and the Accused: Part of the core premise of Criminal Minds is "Ooh. Serial killers! Sexy interesting stories!" Elementary does not glamorize crime. Sherlock himself has a great quote when faced with a serial killer who became a major media sensation because of a profiling detective's book: “You’ve met serial murderers, they’re duller than the queen’s
jubilee.  Mouth-breathers and chronic onanists, the lot of them.” With the exception of the obvious archvillain, this is not a show interesting the mythologizing criminals and crime and often (and intelligently) takes large, convoluted cases that suggest some genius master villain and demonstrates that they're more easily explained by other means, often just by the fact that several different crimes are being incorrectly conflated into one big one.

That said, it also takes a different approach from dealing with the accused than Bones does, which is the show that I hate so much for it. People who are accused or feel like they're going to be accused get lawyers in this show. Because that's what you do. The police are confrontational, as would be natural because they're trying to get evidence, but they are not violent or cruel. Booth on Bones is often an angry, violent man who has tortured innocent people to get evidence (sometimes when they didn't even have it) and the show gives him a pass every time because he's the good guy. No one gets a free pass on Elementary- actions have consequences- but the 'good guys' rarely need it. That's why they're they good guys.

Treatment of Science and Technology: It's a minor point, but CSI and Bones have such a troubled relationship with reality that it hurts me. Elementary doesn't wrap its detective work in gadgets and terrible science. It doesn't get security footage and then "zoom, enhance, enhance, zoom, enhance". It doesn't create a GUI interface in Visual Basic, see if it can track an IP address. It respects that there are depths of science that someone like Sherlock doesn't know and that those depths? Probably really really goddamn irrelevant to solving a murder. There's a scene where Sherlock is comparing shell casings visually and the detective asks him why he's doing that, that the ballistics computers were working on it, and Sherlock just replies that the computers will take a while and the eye it a precision instrument unto itself and dammit he's completely right. A computer can do ballistics analysis, but a trained eye will be even faster. 

Now, I'm not saying Elementary is perfect. But it is so good. I'm glad it's been actually successful, because I would've been very sad if this was the procedural that died when so many other terrible ones have succeeded.