Never mind the new U.S. network and cable shows for a wee while. There are several big-ticket Brit TV items coming this fall and Canadians get a jump on one of them on the weekend.
Sherlock (Friday, Showcase, 10 p.m.) is sublime entertainment. Featuring a souped-up Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century, it's inventive, witty and very stylish TV. This is not period-piece British TV, all exquisite but empty-headed attention to the details of an earlier time. This Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a contemporary Londoner, a "consulting detective" who uses a cellphone, texts Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) to come immediately to 221B Baker St. and avails of the Internet to confirm his suspicions about a case.
Sounds implausible as a classic Holmes drama, does it? Well, it isn't. The series is a seamless blend of Conan Doyle's character and milieu, and now. The original Dr. Watson had experienced war in Afghanistan; this Watson has experienced war in Afghanistan. The original Watson was a diarist who chronicled his adventures with Holmes; this Watson is a blogger who writes up his adventures with Holmes online. There are differences, of course. But they are gently massaged for wit. When, in the first episode, Holmes pulls Watson into a restaurant for a bite to eat, Watson has to tell the owner, several times, "I'm not his date!"
But it's Cumberbatch as Holmes who carries the series (three episodes now, more next year and it will air on PBS's Mystery! in October) with astonishing aplomb. Tall, flop-haired, pale and acid-tongued, he's a mesmerizing figure. The opening scene, with Holmes flogging a dead body with a horsewhip while flirting with a young mortuary attendant, is awe-inspiring in its impact. This Sherlock Homes is mad, sexy and dangerous, and, as he says himself later, he's a high-functioning sociopath. At the time, he's outraged at being described as a "psychopath."
Who knew that the world needed another version of Conan Doyle's creation? Recently, there was Guy Ritchie's movie Sherlock Holmes, set in the 1890s, when the Holmes character flourished in print. In that, Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is a sort of action hero and there's a lot of fist fights. Interesting and revisionist, but hardly groundbreaking. And, in truth, a Holmes type is on TV every week. That's Dr. Gregory House on House. Dr. House is in many ways simply Holmes in a doctor's housecoat - he has Holmes's weakness in his drug addiction and Holmes's strength in his stunning powers of observation and deduction.
Yet this Holmes truly rejuvenates the character. In Los Angeles in August, Cumberbatch talked about the challenge of taking on the iconic character. "It is the most played literary fictional character," he said. "It's in the Guinness Book of Records for it. I follow in the footsteps of about 230 people, in many different languages, and different ages, different times as well. ... I think for any actor to play an iconic character there's a huge pressure that's associated with delivering something that everyone knows culturally, especially in our country. So it was - it was quite nerve-racking, but there is an element of a blank canvas because of this brilliant reinvention and reinvigoration of him being a 21st-century hero. And as you'll hear and hopefully see, it maintains the integrity of Conan Doyle's original. Much to the enjoyment, I hope, of diehard fans of the books.
"I didn't watch a lot of interpretations before filming, specifically. But I had over time seen Jeremy Brett, seen Basil Rathbone, who, I think, are my two ultimate late-Victorian Holmeses. And mainly what I did was read the books."
Mark Gatiss, who with Steven Moffat created this version of the Holmes character, had this to say about the emphatic modernness of Sherlock: "We live in a CSI world. And Conan Doyle effectively invented forensics with Sherlock Holmes. In fact, for many years, the books were prescribed reading for police forces around the world. So how could he be special now? What we worked out is that the police do go around now doing fingerprints and footprint castings, and all those sorts of things, but Sherlock Holmes is still the cleverest man in the room, and that's key to it."
True. Just watch.
Also airing tonight
Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse (CBC, 9 p.m. on Doc Zone) is the first of a four-part look at the financial crash of 2008. It's a wide-ranging examination, zipping from Wall Street to London, Iceland, Dubai and China. What we get in the first part from reporter/producer Terence McKenna is a series of compelling vignettes. We meet a guy in London, a former hippie who used to sell "trinkets" and then became, without any education in finance, a major player in the money markets. We're taken to Iceland, where a man tells us, ruefully, how everybody bought one thing too many - another house, another car. Essentially, the program explains how, in matter of months in Europe, the entire foundation of 21st-century banking seemed to crumble. But, in North America, the warnings were ignored. There are no judgments made, but it's implied that corporate greed was merely a reflection of universal personal greed.
Check local listings.