It’s a good time to be a Sherlock Holmes fan. There are now plenty of adaptations to choose from. There’s the BBC’s Sherlock if you like visual inventiveness and whip-crack dialogue. For a more traditional procedural that does interesting things with characters, there’s CBS’s Elementary. For Hollywood thrills you can go back a few years to the films starring Robert Downey Jr. as the great detective. For series in the Holmesian spirit without the same characters there’s the medical drama House or the mystery/comedy Psych.
However the setting may change, there are some key elements of Sherlock Holmes’s character that remain the same: the keen powers of observation and deduction, the cycles of intense focus on a problem and lethargic dissipation, the antisocial habits that make him near impossible to live with.
Oh, and Sherlock Holmes is a total jerk-ass.
The standard interpretation of Holmes in modern media is that he is an asshole with no patience for anyone else, either because he’s not neurotypical in some fashion or because he just can’t be bothered to care about anything so pedestrian as decent manners. He gets away with it because he’s just so brilliant.
Well, lately I’ve been rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I’ve gotten very used to the modern Holmes, so I was surprised to rediscover that the original Holmes wasn’t like that at all. In fact, Conan Doyle’s Holmes is compassionate and generous.
Co-Geeking 