It’s really hard to craft a hit on TV these days, but Elementary creator and executive producer Rob Doherty seems to have succeeded with his modern take on Sherlock Holmes.

The CBS procedural is nearing the end of its fourth season, and already has been picked up for a fifth.

So he could breathe easy as we talked about his interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes mythos, binge culture and Frank Miller’s Daredevil.

How do you keep your Watson and Holmes fresh?

I think you’re making a mistake if you sit down and start from a place of ‘I must make this different, I must check certain boxes, or avoid certain areas.’ It’s hard not to because Sherlock Holmes has been around for a long time and passed through so many hands, and as a fan of course, I’ve experienced him and Watson in every medium. And yet, ideally, for having had those experiences, you’ve kind of built a sense in your head of who he is, and how he’d be different if they lived in New York, if Watson were a woman, if he was a recovering addict. For having enjoyed his original stories, for having enjoyed the comic books, for having enjoyed the TV shows that were on when I was kid, it becomes a part of this library of knowledge. I never feel limited by it. It’s great to look back and see people who had an affinity for the characters and the franchise and made it infectious. That’s inspiring.

Does the binge culture change how you run a mostly procedural show?

For having run this show now for a few years, I don’t really get to binge anything. I look forward to bingeing. I hear great things. Between having the show and three kids under the age of 7, bingeing is a rumor as far as I’m concerned. So I don’t know if people are being asked to build a show a certain way to make it binge-able. I’d like to think that if you’re doing it well and it’s a good version of whatever genre it is, people will consume it as quickly as they can. Absolutely the procedural side of our show is important, that’s the engine, that’s the skeleton for every show, and we need to honor that. But for us, the most fun comes out of the character stories and going home with Sherlock and Joan, meeting members of each person’s family and building to something. At the end of the season, we tend to get more serialized the deeper we get into the season. That’ll be the case this year. Morland [John Noble] is very binge-able.

How do you come up with mysteries week in and week out?

I’ve been blessed with great staffs. I have some writers on the show who’ve been with us from the beginning. Every time you find someone who can see the show how you see it and can come up with these stories, I sleep better and better at night.

On the first season, nobody knows what the show is necessarily, because you’re finding it as you go. At this point, there are DVD sets that can catch you up really quick. Everyone knows what the show is supposed to be. Everyone knows the kinds of stories that I respond to, that CBS wants and pursues, so writers float a two-page story document to me. I wish I knew what the ratio was, how many of these story documents go through the sale process. I’m not sure, but the good news is, somehow there’s always just enough to do 24 of these every year. Every once in a while someone is bold enough to dip into the canon and pull something out because it seems appropriate to our take on Sherlock. Somehow, knock on wood, they keep coming.

What were the challenges of bringing Sherlock Holmes into the 21st century and keeping him grounded?

In the beginning it was really a matter of just keeping your blinders on. If you want to get into the Sherlock Holmes business, you can’t be surprised or disappointed once people express skepticism or concern or want to compare your product to someone else’s. That just comes with the territory. But in the beginning it’s a challenge, you don’t want to get bogged down in that. You just want to look straight ahead, do your work, execute your vision, and if it goes, if it’s contagious, that’s great. If it doesn’t align with people’s expectations, they’ll move off it. Easier said than done, I know, but that’s how we operated as we developed the show.

The biggest grounding element has always been Sherlock as an addict, or Sherlock as an addict in recovery. I love comic books. I love superheroes. The best are relatable. Or at least they have elements in their lives that are relatable. That’s really why I settled on the idea of this person, who’s known to have an issue with narcotics, that he went too far, crashed and is now building himself up again. That people can relate to. People can’t relate to a guy walking into a room and spotting 10 different things that tell them what happened in there a half-hour ago. That’s fun to watch but it’s not relatable. Always keeping that forefront and never leading with it, never saying ‘this is a show about addiction…and sometimes we solve mysteries.’ But making sure it’s always cooked into the cake every week, or at least over the course of the season. That goes a long way in making our Sherlock a success.

You mentioned superheroes. In many ways, Sherlock is a superhero.

Absolutely. Arguably the first.

Who’s your favorite?

My absolute favorite growing up was Daredevil. When I was a kid Frank Miller was writing it, and it was his iconic run and the way he would describe Matt Murdock’s sensitivity to things that was absolutely in my head as I was writing our Sherlock. He probably has a problem with drugs because the world is so loud. So thank you Daredevil and thank you Frank Miller.

Thank you Rob Doherty.

Elementary returns to CBS with new episodes Sunday April 10, leading up to the fourth season finale on April 24.

[Cube image courtesy of CBS via CBS.com; the body image courtesy of CBS via EW]

Tags:


  Save as PDF