An American one-hour drama, like Dexter or CSI: New York, adheres to an act structure, as all mainstream drama does. Stage plays favor two acts. Many Hollywood films contain three acts. Elementary is divided into five. Act one (a few minutes shorter than the rest) establishes both the mostly-serious main plot and the sometimes-comical subplot, and it ends with the title sequence. Act two expands on the details of the main plot, ending with a complication. Act three repeats the structure of act two. Act four deals with the fallout of the complications and ends with either a surprise reveal or another murder. Act five wraps up the main plot via Sherlock’s outside-the-box thinking and Watson’s medical knowledge, and the subplot is resolved with a relationship-building moment between Sherlock and Watson, which sometimes reveals details of Sherlock’s mysterious personal history. In this way the predictable act structure reinforces expectations of character development, and establishes a pattern for the writers to develop the characters over the entire series. When questions about Sherlock or Watson remain at the end of the episode the audience does not feel cheated like they would at the end of a film because they know that the pattern will repeat in the next episode. The predictable act structure is central to the dramatic language writers use to communicate stories to audiences, and Elementary follows that tradition in every way.
A second key to dramatic language is in character archetypes. Sherlock Holmes is a character that the audience can instantly recognize; he is intelligent, witty, highly capable at logical thinking, very good at his profession, and has one debilitating personal flaw. Like an act structure, he is a familiar form that the writers can hang new ideas on. He can be written to be a bitter doctor (House), a rule-driven serial killer (Dexter), an obsessive-compulsive former cop (Monk), an empathetic FBI investigator (Hannibal) or a recovering-addict detective. Part of the Sherlock archetype is the relationship to Dr. Watson. Joan Watson is an upstanding professional, she is an expert in her field, but she is often baffled by the thought processes that drive Sherlock Holmes. She is an accomplished surgeon, which is often key to her part in the solution of a mystery. During the series’ lighter moments these two characters operate as a double act, like George Burns and Gracie Allen or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. In terms of archetype, Watson is the “straight man.” The comedy element of the series is given more or less weight depending on the seriousness of the main plot. In “Possibility Two” Watson is tested by Sherlock by being sent to a shady laundromat, and her lighter story balances the relative seriousness of the main plot. In many ways the comedy of Elementary is based on the absurdity provided by Sherlock’s personality and methods being reflected against Watson’s “normalcy.”
Absurdity, at least in dramatic narratives, can fall into a gray area for believability. Rabid fans of a series or filmmaker sometimes forgive awkward plotting, contradictions, and deus ex machina endings, but venomous critics pounce on the same moments to dismiss the work as amateurish. In the case of a deus ex machina, where a sudden reversal of fortune comes as if by “an act of God”, the audience will feel cheated unless there is a value in ignoring it. Screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee calls the deus ex machina an “insult to the audience… because it is a lie.” (358) But these contrived plots can be made palatable in a few different ways. Jurassic Park, for example, ends with the T-Rex appearing from no where to save the main characters from a velociraptor; had it not come at the end of a very tense action scene with spectacular CGI, the audience would have cared about the absurdity.
Elementary uses the established genius of Sherlock Holmes to hide absurd plotting from the audience. In "The Deductionist," the fifth act confrontation is reached when Sherlock tracks the killer to his hideout by triangulating radio signals he heard in the background of the killer's call to the police. Comparing signal strengths and recognizing a "microbroadcaster" Sherlock is able to deduce the exact location, where he lays in wait for the killer to return. The fact that the killer was scanning radio stations while talking to the police is explainable and ironic; he was trying to cover up background noise that would betray his location. The fact he was near to a "microbroadcaster" was convenient, but not unreasonable in New York City, which has 112 registered broadcasters (radio-locator). However, the fact that Sherlock was able to recognize and triangulate the stations is only an acceptable solution because Sherlock Holmes is an established genius. In “The Red Team” Sherlock allows himself to be taken hostage by a military advisor who is planning to murder his former colleagues who know the details of a dangerous plan. In the climax Sherlock confesses that he has already written down the details of the plan, which makes any attempt to cover it up through murder pointless. It turns out that he was bluffing, and only through his super-human intellect did he manage to figure out the plan himself while being held captive. The absurdity in this episode is that Sherlock is able to calculate in a few minutes the top secret military strategy that took several experts months to invent.
With the plot structure of CSI and the archetype characters of Arthur Conan Doyle, Elementary is a revitalized, “new” take on old material, and it is part of a current trend in television. Bates Motel takes the narrative established in Robert Bloch’s Psycho, made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s film, and sets the originating events in motion in the modern world. Hannibal takes the novels of Thomas Harris and elaborates on the previously unwritten story of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship before Red Dragon. House of Cards is an American adaptation of a British political series. Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome is a prequel series to the remake of Battlestar Galactica. All of these new shows have recycled some or all of the characters, structures, and plots of previous work. This is not surprising, but it is indicative of a larger issue facing the film and television industries.
When television made multiple channels of visual media available to an audience in their living room, the film industry was forced to respond by creating theatrical experiences that television could not match. The technicolor boom of musicals followed by the breakdown of the Hayes Code regulations meant that movie theaters could offer content that was both visually more impressive and thematically more adult. (Cousins 223) New media based on internet streaming has further expanded television’s reach to the audience, and the film industry has responded with expanding on digital technologies like motion capture and pushing for more content in 3D.
Alongside the film industry’s reaction to television stealing its audience, the television industry is faced with a pressure to meet the needs of its larger audience. Living room access demanded constant new content, and the existence of different channels multiplied the demand. Now that internet streaming has made on-demand television content available on every smartphone and tablet, the content requirement has increased. Filling the demand depends on the industry’s creative side, which comes up against the reality that creating a piece of original programming, marketing an unknown actor, and keeping the audience’s attention are difficult obstacles. Removing one or more obstruction by recycling “old” concepts, casting established actors, and falling back on reliable plot devices increases a series’ chance of success. Elementary has succeeded because it does all three.
Few established dynamics are as familiar as Holmes and Watson. Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced Sherlock Holmes in 1888, and he has been adapted and rewritten ever since. (Milos-Plunket) Lucy Liu has 78 titles on her IMDb page going back as far as 1991, and was paid $5.5 million for her role in Kill Bill: Vol. 1. She was an established film star when she took the role of Joan Watson, and she follows other established actors like Ashley Judd (The Missing), William H. Macy (Shameless), Glenn Close (Damages), Jeremy Irons (The Borgias), and Dustin Hoffman (Luck) in moving to television. And the plots of Elementary, although tailored to fit the characters, are standard television mysteries that could have appeared in any of the other series fitting the amateur detective-duo mould.
The idea to take old concepts and give them “new” twists is as old as storytelling; the ancient Greeks retold the same stories in different ways; Shakespeare based several plays on past works; even Alfred Hitchcock remade his 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much with Jimmy Stewart in 1956. (IMDb) The BBC reinvented Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for the modern world in 2010, and CBS has followed their lead, which has resulted in one of the most popular new shows of the 2012 Fall season (Huff Post). In “Snow Angels,” Doyle’s Miss Hudson is re-introduced as a transgendered woman; this is only the most recent example of how the series is combining current trends, such as including LGBT characters, with established forms. Until the television industry is so flush with talent and original content that the audiences don’t have enough hours in the day to take it in, there will be a pattern of rewriting old forms, attaching new performers to the surface, and reciting old plots. And the television industry will never be that flush with talent. The upside, from a critical point of view, is that even working within these “old” forms, creativity can present the entertaining illusion of something “new.”
Works Cited
Cousins, Mark. The Story of Film. London: Pavillion Books, 2006. Print.
Huff Post. Elementary’ Renewed For Season 2 Along With 13 Other CBS Series. Huffington Post. 28 March 2013. Web. 10 April 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/elementary-renewed-season-2-cbs_n_2965937.html>
IMDb. Lucy Liu (I). Internet Movie Database. April 2013. Web. 10 April 2013. <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005154/bio>
IMDb. Sherlock Holmes (Character). Internet Movie Database. 2013. Web. 10 April 2013. <http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0026631/>
Jurassic Park. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough. Universal, 1993. DVD.
McKee, Robert. Story. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997. Print.
Milos-Plunket, Andrea. The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate. Andrea Milos-Plunket. 2000. Web. 10 April 2013. <www.sherlockholmesonline.org>
“Possibility Two.” Elementary. Dir. Seith Mann. Perf. Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. CBS. Global, Vancouver, 21 Feb. 2013. Television.
Radio-Locator. Radio Stations in New York, New York. Theodric Technologies LLC. 2013. Web. 10 April 2013. <http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=New%20York&state=NY>
“Snow Angels.” Elementary. Dir. Andrew Bernstein. Perf. Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. CBS. Global, Vancouver, 4 April 2013. Television.
“The Deductionist.” Elementary. Dir. John Polson. Perf. Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. CBS. Global, Vancouver, 3 Feb. 2013. Television.
“The Red Team.” Elementary. Dir. Christine Moore. Perf. Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. CBS. Global, Vancouver, 31 Jan. 2013. Television.
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