Monday 26 May 2014

Will the real Sherlock Holmes please stand up?

How many TV shows are essentially Sherlock Holmes? Obviously there's Sherlock and Elementary, which are fairly direct modern adaptations, and House, too, but there's also Monk and Psych, both of whose main characters fit the "hyper-observant eccentric" mould very well. Shawn Spencer on Psych even has a sidekick with a medical background, albeit in pharmaceutical sales rather than actual medical training. On Castle we do have an eccentric civilian consultant, but he's not hyper-observant, so I wouldn't necessarily count that. On Bones, the eccentric and the doctor character are the same person, and her powers of observation and deduction are fairly narrowly focused on anthropology, but you could make a case for Temperance Brennan being a type of Sherlock Holmes, too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you start looking into it, those particular character traits show up quite often.
PPS - Especially on shows with single-word titles.

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