Sherlock: TV Review

1:13 PM PDT 10/21/2010 by David Rooney

In “Sherlock,” the BBC’s inventive contemporary makeover of crime fiction’s most iconic detective duo, Martin Freeman’s John Watson is introduced as a brooding war veteran returning injured from Afghanistan and possibly suffering from PTSD, while Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes is first seen diligently flogging a corpse with a riding crop to measure the time it takes for bruises to appear.

Refashioning your protagonists as a damaged soul spat out of an ongoing conflict and a self-described “high functioning sociopath” might seem an obvious ploy to blow the dust off well-worn Victorian archetypes. But those scenes, and many other choice nuggets, were lifted almost directly from Arthur Conan Doyle.