Sherlock: "A Study in Pink" (Hartswood Films, Masterpiece Theatre, BBC Wales, PBS, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 13) KPBS kicked off a series of reruns of Sherlock, the British TV series starting in 2010 that sought to update the characters of Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), his brother Mycroft (Mark Gatiss, who’s also listed as the show’s co-creator), Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman), Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves), landlady Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs) and Professor Moriarty (as yet unseen in the show’s first episode) to the 21st century. That had already been done in the previous Holmes movies, though they had been made in the 1920’s through the 1940’s and therefore their modern-dress settings have taken a bit of a “period” effect by now. (The 1939 films The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, made at 20th Century-Fox with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson, were the first set during the Victorian period of the original Holmes stories – though when Universal picked up the Rathbone-Bruce series in the 1940’s they moved it back to the present and frequently included World War II as a plot element.) The episode they showed last night was the first actually presented to the public, “A Study in Pink,” though imdb.com lists an unaired pilot that was made before that. Like most of the later episodes, this one featured a title taken over, but tweaked, from an original Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in this case “A Study in Scarlet,” the first Holmes tale Conan Doyle published. Alas, the plot of this one (written by Steven Moffat and directed by Paul McGuigan) had almost nothing in common with Conan Doyle’s original plot line of two old-codger Mormons who emigrated to England and continued their feud over a 17-year-old girl both wanted to marry (presumably as part of a harem of “plural wives”). About the only thing Moffat took from the Conan Doyle story was a murder victim tracing the word “RACHE” with their finger (it was a man in Conan Doyle’s story, a woman in Moffat’s) and Holmes and the others being momentarily confused whether it was the name “RACHEL” with the victim having expired before s/he could finish, or the German word “RACHE,” meaning “revenge.” “A Study in Pink” is the tale of four apparent “suicides” of various prominent Londoners, all with their bodies being found in places where they wouldn’t ordinarily be, all of whom offed themselves by taking one of a pair of speckled pills in a clear glass mini-bottle.

Holmes, of course, determines that these victims have actually been murdered – they did indeed take their own lives but they were somehow hypnotized into doing so – and after an hour and a half of meager complications the culprit turns out to be a middle-aged London cabdriver whom Holmes encountered during his investigation and nearly tricked Holmes into taking the fatal dose himself when Watson neatly killed him by firing a semi-automatic pistol through a closed window at a fairly substantial range just before Holmes took the pill. As the murderous cabdriver dies Holmes steps on his neck to get him to reveal the ultimate boss of the criminal enterprise that hatched his plot, and the man finally gasps out, “Moriarty!” – a name which, Holmes admits to Watson, as yet means nothing to him. The show scores in the finely honed acting of Benedict Cumberbatch (who joined John Barrymore and Basil Rathbone on the short list of actors who’ve played both Sherlock Holmes and Richard III) and Martin Freeman, but the story itself is too moth-eaten and makes so little sense it makes Conan Doyle look like a master of plot construction by comparison. Much of the updating is genuinely clever – the pink object referenced in the title is a pink suitcase the fourth and last “suicide” victim left behind, and Holmes had Watson send a text message from Watson’s phone to the victim’s in hopes the murderer will answer – and there’s a nice scene in which Inspector Lestrade borrows some detectives from the British drug enforcement unit to stage a raid on Holmes’s and Watson’s apartment at 221B Baker Street to harass him. (They find nothing; in line with the original Holmes stories, I’d expected them to find cocaine and bust Holmes for it on the spot.) There’s also a nice subplot in which Watson tries to cruise a woman police detective, Sally Donovan (Vinette Robinson), even though she’s one of Lestrade’s detail that are trying to harass Holmes and get him to drop the case. Still, when this show first came to the U.S. Charles and I both liked the other modern-dress rewrite of Holmes that broadcast around the same time, Elementary, with Jonny Lee Miller as a reprobate Holmes exiled to the U.S. for his drug addiction (though in Elementary his drug of choice was heroin, not cocaine) and Lucy Liu as a sex-changed Dr. Watson assigned to him as a “sober living companion.” (The idea of making Dr. Watson a woman had already been done in a quite charming 1970 Holmes pastiche, They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott as a man who’s deluded himself into thinking he’s Holmes and Joanne Woodward as a female psychotherapist who happens to be named Watson.)