E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

As another great season of ten perfectly-crafted episodes of The Bridge (yet another great Scandinoir) ends, leaving Saga in the rain with great responsibility on her shoulders, and some life lessons still to be learned, Eyewear welcomes this reflection by brilliant American writer Steven Timberman on Sherlock ’s strange, surreal, and off-putting third series. BBC’s Sherlock reimagining has always been an odd duckling. In it’s first two series Moffat and his team created a Sherlock Holmes that slotted nicely between complete fealty to the source material and entirely abandoning the spirit of the original stories. Moffat’s Sherlock stood out – both from the original stories and the endless imitators currently clogging up the television. And then Sherlock took two years off. Cumberbatch became Assange and Khan, Freeman went to Middle Earth, and Moffat hopped in the TARDIS for a while. After watching Sherlock ’s first three episodes in two years, I felt discombobulated. Th...

Updating Sherlock Holmes is never a bad idea.  Of the many characters in the public domain, few are as instantly timeless - a crime-solving eccentric genius in London, one of the world's great cities.  The BBC had a no-brainer on their hands.  Especially with the latest money-making film reboot starring Robert Downey Jr.  In this TV series, the keynote is the same: slightly irreverent humour, especially about the "gay thing" that perplexes and amuses many, vis. a vis. Holmes and Watson, his stalwart medical companion, sometimes more, sometimes less capable.    Different is the time - here we are "contemporary" - and get the same London as in Luther .  Overall, this is an excellent new version, with enough fun ("three patch problem") and style to make it good TV (as in "good police").  But it is hardly as clever as it wishes to think it is.  Screenwriters simply need to understand that aspects of their craft make them supremely easy to fig...

Yesterday a plaque went up in my old neighbourhood, Marylebone, at the Langham Hotel, commemorating a most unusual gathering held on August 30, 1889. Joseph Marshall Stoddart , the publisher, introduced two younger writers to each other, who had never before met, and asked them both to create work for his Lippincott's Monthly Magazine . Wilde went away and wrote Dorian Gray , and Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes with the story 'The Sign of Four'. Easily a contender for most interesting literary lunch of all time.