The easy target

 That grand Sherlockian David Stuart Davies stirred up a little discussion on Twitter this Friday afternoon, as good a time for stirring discussion as there is, I suspect, as we office drones grow bored. It looked like this:

It prompted so many thoughts in me that I couldn't just tweet a line back -- so many parts and pieces to react to! 

"... have we had enough . . ."

I'm getting into my mid-sixties, I've had quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes and have I had enough? Well, of some things, yes. There are pastiches out there that my fresher counterparts love that give me indigestion. And as much as my friends love Jeremy Brett, I filled up on that boy early on. Adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles? I definitely am full up on those. I really wish I could whittle down this big ol' Sherlockian belly of mine, but it has been decades in the making, at it's hard to starve myself to the point where I start craving more of certain Holmes mental victuals. 

"... enough of comic/parody/farcical versions of Sherlock Holmes? Such an easy target . . ."

Three words: Holmes and Watson. Here's the thing, if it was as bad as its critics say it is, Sherlock Holmes is apparently not so easy a target at all. And I loved it, more than any Holmes comedy ever, which makes it a rare bird for me as well. While it is easy to do a parody of Sherlock Holmes, and much of the general public does like its clownish Holmeses, I don't think a truly great comic version of Holmes is easy at all.

And second thought: Robert Downey Junior, Jonny Miller, and Benedict Cumberbatch -- While not parody, both seemed to like to take occasional jabs at Holmes and perhaps find reason to laugh at him as much as with him at times. They were not completely comic, of course, but there was certainly comedy there.

Remember that opening to "Three Garridebs" that reads, "It may have been a comedy or it may have been a tragedy." The comedy would seem to be based on the characters of the real and faux Garridebs of the tale, not Holmes and Watson. But that was the Original Canon. Movies and television are something else entirely, and one could, with some work, rank comedy content percentages that vary widely. Ronald Howard's 1954 series is very high on the comedy scale, while the movie Murder by Decree had, to my memory, exactly two comic moments in its Jack the Ripper tale (the pea and the scarf).

"A dark, serious version in the tradition of Doyle . . ."

For some reason The Irregulars on Netflix comes to mind with that statement, though the Doyle tradition that show follows is more along the lines of his supernatural fiction more than his Sherlock. How dark and serious can Sherlock Holmes go? We've seen as dark as The Last Sherlock Holmes Story in older pastiche and "Oh, lord, don't make me remember that!" dark among the fan fiction in the last decade. The tradition of Doyle is a tricky thing, as so many have tried to emulate it over the years, which brings me to my final thought after musing upon David Stuart Davies's tweet for a Friday.

With Sherlock Holmes, I think almost anything can work if the writer or director is skilled enough, which is basically true of all fiction. What is preposterous in the hands of an amateur can be mind-blowing in the hands of a master. But DSD is right, no matter what the skill level of the creator, we could definitely use more Holmes-work at the highest public levels that portray both Holmes and Watson with respect and not treat the detective genius like a Big Bang Theory sitcom nerd, or his friend and partner as the frustrated member of The Odd Couple (yet an older sitcom).

There's still some solid gold to be mined there, in hands skilled enough to do the job.