At some point, it's just painful.

Today, I am not a BBC Sherlock fan.

Why? Because there is tease, and then there's just torment. There's "Hey, look at me! Look at me!" time-wasting attention-grabbing when you have nothing to supply to rate that attention.

If you haven't seen the morsel the Sherlock folk tossed at fandom yesterday, here's the story link to "Sherlock Returns: BBC confirms special with picture of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman back filming."

So we got a picture of Sherlock's main characters in Victorian garb. No explanation, just a mysterious single image that makes no sense by itself. The theories arose immediately. Cosplay? Time travel? After last season's distinctly varying episodic shifts in tone, just shifting the whole show to a different time period for a dream or alternate universe version of itself doesn't seem off the table.

But here's the thing. That special episode is still a year away.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. A bunch of really good television shows that are currently entertaining us are having mid-season finales. Christmas shopping has to be done, and there's a ton of interesting Sherlock Holmes related stuff out there to buy. And Elementary continues its reign of schlock.

And the Sherlock crew are shouting, "HEY! LOOK AT US!" while also saying how they have to alter their filming style because too many people are out on the streets looking at them.

They've played the teasing game with the fans before, and it was fun, it worked, all was right with the world. But everything gets old at some point. And for me, I think we've hit that point. Sure, I'm going to enjoy seeing Cumberbatch and Freeman as Holmes and Watson again OVER A YEAR FROM NOW, when there's actually something to watch.

But right now? Screw those guys. I've got The Imitation Game, Gotham, and a dozen other things to watch. And if I want to hypothesize about something, I can spin my theories off the original Doyle Canon, which isn't going to jump up and be different from what I thought next December and make all those theories worthless.

Because that Sherlock has been a constant, reliable friend for decades. With no torment that whole time.