For the Brits among us, or the pirates, here's a quick review of the first episode of BBC1's "Sherlock."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcFHeTaS9ew For fans of Conan Doyle's NPD detective, "Sherlock" is everything that Guy Ritchie's recent "Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows" is not -- intelligent, entertaining, and true to the spirit of the original. And that's weird, because the BBC "Sherlock" is updated to take place in our time, whereas the Guy Ritchie thing is set in its original time period. But whereas one can make a case for neither Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr. nor Jude Law ever having read a single word of a single Sherlock Holmes story before making their films, one cannot say the same for Steven Moffat. He's a bit of a TV wunderkind in Britain, having created "Coupling," and having done a previous modern-day updating of a classic, "Jekyll." Moffat just *gets* Sherlock Holmes. As a writer he's obviously as clever as his protagonist himself, and there are laugh-out-loud funny moments in this first episode from the new season, "A Scandal In Belgravia." There is also great intelligence -- no need to fill screen time with special effects and bad martial arts here. But the real coup is in the casting. Only in Britain could an actor named Benedict Cumberbatch become famous, much less play as famous a character as Sherlock Holmes. But he does so perfectly. Martin Freeman does just as well as Dr. Watson. And interestingly, even though both the Ritchie film and the new BBC series con- tain the same villainess, Irene Adler, you are likely to remember the name of only one of the women playing her, Lara Pulver. If you've ever been a fan of Sherlock Holmes but have a life and don't want to waste your time with a bad version of him, skip the blockbuster movie and find a way to watch the BBC1 series. Elementary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOkLuk3Nx4Q
