Victoria Coren Has a Mad 2

I am an avid Sherlockian. I have three different versions of the Canon, including William S. Baring-Gould’s monumental Annotated, as well as two biographies of Holmes, the Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, and several dozen pastiches, parodies, and what today are called “re-imaginings.”

I was mildly surprised Victoria Coren doesn’t like the idea of Lucy Liu as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Elementary. Indeed, she was able to dislike it without having seen it:

Meanwhile, Lucy Liu is worried that people will see only the gender change to her character and miss another excellent improvement to the rubbish old original story, telling the Times: “It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie’s Angels; Watson’s ethnicity is also a big deal”, as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn’t cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

Personally, I’d like to press Liu’s face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It’s not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all.

Coren shows an uncharacteristic insularity (well, she does live on an island) that ignores the long history of Sherlock Holmes parodies, imitators, spin-offs, and rebirths, from Solar Pons to Naked is the Best Disguise. Indeed, somewhere along the line I read a story that posited Sherlock Holmes in a partnership with Teddy Roosevelt.

One suspects her ideal Watson to be the insufferable dunderhead portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the movies and on radio–the Watson of large walrus moustache and small IQ. (You can find many of the Nigel Bruce-Basil Rathbone radio shows at various OTR sites and the Internet Archive–see the OTR section on the sidebar.)*

Elementary is quite a skillful “re-imagining” of Holmes and Watson, fast-paced and, by the absurdly low standards of American television mysteries, well-plotted. It uses fewer plot gimmicks to get from body to arrest than popular shows such as CSI, NCIS, and Bones, which purport to use science and technology to track down clues but which, actually, use some kind of fictional science in which month-long lab tests are completed during the commercial break and in which agencies have resources that no actual government agency has, except perhaps the NSA (for example, what investigative agency would devote a team of four highly-skilled scientists and two FBI agents to investigate the death of a print-shop clerk, even it the remains were found in a post office? It was quite good fun to watch, but, really, give me a freaking break!).

I suspect that, if Sherlock Holmes were contacted in Sussex, where he has been quietly keeping bees and investigating methods of segregation of the queen since his retirement, he would suggest that Victoria Coren could benefit from cultivating her sense of playfulness, which seems somewhat underdeveloped.

Updated 2012-10-15: Edited for clarity.

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*The best portrayal of Holmes and Watson, the one truest to the spirit and characters of the Canon, was the one in the Jeremy Brett series, in which Watson, much like Lucy Liu’s Watson, was no bumbling idiot, but rather an intelligent person who just cannot keep up with Holmes–a Mustang to Holmes’s Lamborghini.