Elementary - 'Pilot'

Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, Manny Perez and Johnny Lee Miller; apparently
Perez will be token-swapped for a black guy for the main run.

Thanks to Sky boxed sets (for now at least) I'm catching up on another show I missed out of the gate, Elementary, the CBS modern take on Sherlock Holmes.

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) is hired to act as sober companion to Sherlock Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller), who is established as the kind of addict who breaks out of rehab the night before his formal release. They are a troubled pair, Watson a former surgeon who lost a patient and Holmes a former consultant for Scotland Yard whose trauma is not revealed in the Pilot (although if you know anything about a) Holmes and b) adaptations of Holmes you won't need Watson's astute probing to deduce the involvement of a, nay the, woman.) Holmes has devised his own post-rehab regimen, which involves resuming his consulting work, thanks to a connection with Captain Thomas Gregson, an NYPD detective who studied counter-terrorism methods with Special Branch post-9/11.

The first case tackled by Holmes and his new shadow involves a woman attacked in her home and apparently kidnapped, until Holmes finds her dead in her panic room. He quickly concludes that she is the second victim of a nascent serial killer, but when the murderer - a man with severe mental illness - is found dead, he becomes convinced that something more devious is at work.

The investigation is a solid opener. The writing also allows Liu's Watson to match Holmes step for step. There was a lot of schtick about gender-swapping Watson, but in its opening stages at least there is no sign that the writers are setting up a romantic relationship. Miller's Holmes may not be spot on Conan Doyle's creation, but neither is Cumberbatch's, and what both get right is the mixture of rage and precision, of detachment and involvement. Elementary's Holmes is as abrasive and disdainful of human frailty as he should be, but also utterly incensed by those who abuse that frailty.

The core relationship between Holmes and Watson gets off to a good start. Joan Watson is sharp and acerbic, with a flair for investigation that even Holmes notes with some respect. She is very much a match for Holmes, if not quite in intellect then in her force of personality, avoiding my least favourite thing about Sherlock, which is Watson's near constant bafflement. Martin Freeman does baffled very well, but after an excellent showing in 'A Study in Pink', it was a real shame to see him slip quite so much into Holmes's shadow.