One of the series that we are watching this year is the Sherlock Holmes series Elementary. It seemed like a suitable replacement for House, since House was basically Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting. The main character feeds our need for an arrogant, antisocial ass who just happens to be able to draw useful conclusions from flimsy evidence.
Someone told me that Elementary was poor when compared to the BBC series Sherlock. So since the pilot episode was one of the Apple freebies this holiday season, I downloaded it. And yes, it was better, so far as it went.
We have purchased the rest of the Sherlock episodes available (all five more of them, as it happens) and are very slowly making our way through them. Last night we watched S2E2 which means that we only have one more remaining unseen.
And that is where the principle difference between Elementary and Sherlock comes in to play. Elementary is designed to be a weekly, 40-odd minute story with a beginning, middle, and end. Sherlock episodes are more like self-contained movies that need to be spaced out much more because there is so much more in them.
Elementary is weekly TV, a weekly fix of entertainment; Sherlock is an event that needs to be scheduled and prepared for.
I read on Google+ (yes, I use Google+, stop laughing) that the second episode of series three has just finished principle photography, and now there will be a break in production to permit other commitments to be satisfied and that principle photography on S3E3 will start presently. So within a year we should get the next batch. But we will undoubtedly get many, many more Elementary episodes before then, weekly fixes that I look forward to.
