Plenty to say about Sherlock, and plenty is already being said. It was proper, everyone watched it, everyone's talking about it, "water cooler" etc etc telly. The first two episodes aired while I was on holiday and I didn't even know that they were going to be on; by the time I got home it was wall to wall on Twitter (people discuss things in places other than Twitter? I wouldn't know as am currently working in an empty office.) We're (almost) all agreed: it was clever and funny and brilliantly performed, and maybe we're not sure about the visible text messages and the blogging storyline (in a word: NO) but Benedict Cumberbatch is an extraordinarily-named genius who has made Holmes his own and I wonder if he turned down Doctor Who (that bit's just me).
One thing I have found interesting is the hormonal outpouring from female viewers including me: I've seen Cumberbatch in plenty of stuff before and surely he was never sexy (I mean, Stuart: A Life Backwards? Thanks no) only now suddenly he is wearing a long coat (see also Doctor Who - men, if you know what's good for you, buy a long coat) and his eyes look kind of oh yes, and he's got a very funny script and a decisive don't-give-a-toss demeanor and he's clever and YES I WOULD. But in addition, I don't know if it's the presence of a gay co-creator but there's so much man-on-man flirting going on: Holmes and Watson, Holmes and Lestrade, Holmes and Moriarty, Holmes and everybody basically. And we love it. By which I mean the ladies love it. There's a whole other piece to be written about how, in the era of the internet and slashfic a previously unknown well of female interest in men getting it on with other men has emerged (I just typoed 'me getting it on with other men', which is a whole other other piece) but I have a deadline so I can't write it right now (magazine editors: you know where to find me and my rates are very competitive). I'm not surprised to see this coming from Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat - both having done time in RTD-era Doctor Who which was the first bit of mainstream family telly to crank up the gay flirting and win. (Ironically, given the context, in Moffat-era Doctor Who the gay flirting has been excised, and Gatiss wrote the one really duff episode of the most recent season, the WW2 dalek one, and I wonder if he feels like his wings have been clipped.) I'm mentioning Doctor Who a lot, which is because Sherlock is really Doctor Who for grown-ups: in an updated version of a popular old classic, a mysterious, socially removed, insouciant but charming supergenius and his prosaic sidekick solve crimes involving monstrous villains and a hypereal version of the world. I guess it's not surprising that I adored it.
Any downside? Sadly yes. Sherlock's representation of women is awful. It's maybe unfortunate for Moffat and Gatiss that I watched it so soon after hearing about the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test? Why yes, it's a formula for figuring out whether the films have the most basic characterisation of women. Basically it works like this:
1. Is there more than one woman in it?
2. Do the women have names?
3. Do they talk to each other?
4. Do they talk to each other about anything other than men?
Try to think of some films that pass this test. Er... (I came up with Juno and all of the work of Mike Leigh, but it's much harder when you move past independent movies into the world of mainstream.)
TV is way ahead of the curve on this, with the likes of Mad Men or The West Wing proving that it is entirely possible to have a fantastic show with a wealth of intelligent female characters who have more on their minds than who they are or aren't shagging and what the men are up to. Sadly Sherlock isn't one of them. There are plenty of female characters, yes, but they never speak to each other, and if you think for a minute about why they don't speak to each other you'll realise it's because they'd have nothing to say, as they aren't really characters at all, just a bunch of girlfriends, victims and idiots whose lives revolve around the men. So Sarah, who exists to be Watson's girlfriend, and gets captured and shrieks; and Molly, who has a simpering crush on Holmes that renders her incapable of using the brain you assume she must have to be a qualified pathologist; and the policewoman who slags Holmes off but doesn't appear to have much by way of a job to do; and Mrs Hudson, who is Una Stubbs and therefore wonderful and very funny but a bit thick and makes the tea. And lots of dead people, and one criminal mastermind in episode two who actually isn't that much of a mastermind because she's just following orders from Moriarty.
Ah, Moriarty. When the envelope turned up in episode three with a woman's handwriting on it, I had high hopes that Moriarty would be a woman; making Holmes's evil nemesis female would have been a nice 21st century touch. Making Molly Moriarty, for example, would have been an excellent about-turn for her frankly insulting characterisation (oh no I'm going to cry because Holmes thinks I've put on weight!) But no, this is boys' games in a boys' world, and the girls are incidental. Which is not to say that Moriarty wasn't fantastic: like the rest of the male characters, he was bright, witty, sharp and very hot. In fact, the irony is that while female viewers have got the total horn watching all the sexy men running around being clever and cool, (straight) male viewers have some eye candy here and there, but nobody who is any fun or actually does anything (seriously: 'girl in car who looks at her phone a lot'?). So in a way, we women have the better deal. But in another way, we really don't.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, picking holes in something that is so much better than the British TV norm, but I don't mind a lazy attitude to women as much in something that's crap, because it's crap across the board; this is good, and so it should know better. End of mini-series report, then: brilliant as far as it goes, but when you get the recommission, if the women could actually talk to each other next time, that would be great.
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