One of the Best

As many people know, I really love many TV shows. Psych, Castle, Bones, NCIS, White Collar, Leverage, and In Plain Sight, just to name a few. But this week, Alyna (who also watches many shows, and a wider variety) and I have pretty much decided on one of the overall best shows: BBC's Sherlock. I just love it.

I haven't read many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, but one of my absolute favorite books is about Sherlock Holmes after he has retired from Baker Street (Beekeeper's Apprentice and the rest of the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King), so I have a fairly specific idea of who Sherlock is and what he should be like. While the movies starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are amusing, they really aren't very true to the characters or books. But this series...it's amazing.

Sherlock is set in modern-day London, but it's very brilliant in the characters and the script. The idea of the writers was to strip away all the Victorian time period trappings, and have Doyle's characters live and breath in the modern day. "It's not Sherlock Holmes, updated...it's Sherlock Holmes, restored." The Scotland Yard still investigates crimes using modern day forensics, and everyone uses phones and the internet (John publishes a blog about Sherlock's detective cases), but Sherlock still has the brilliant powers of detail and deduction. He's very much the obnoxious, superior, and socially-isolated detective.

What I really love is the sheer brilliance of the show. I could (and have) watch these episodes over and over and get something new out of it each time. So far there have been two seasons with three 90-minute episodes each. The premier episode, "A Study in Pink," was very good, but I love the second season. Also, I completely sobbed while watching the last episode, "Reichenbach Fall." It's amazing and awful.

I absolutely recommend Sherlock to anyone who enjoys Sherlock Holmes, clever scripts, British accents, or really "I want to kill you myself" bad guys. And to everyone else, too.