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Watching Monk . . .

Why doesn’t Sherlock Holmes have his own television show?

Conan Doyle’s other popular fiction The Lost World has been adapted as a syndicated series. Victorian man of adventure Phineas Fogg and his chronicler Jules Verne have a t.v. series. So why not Sherlock Holmes?

The market is obviously . . . and to the Sherlockian, almost irritatingly . . . there for our Mr. Holmes. Look at the forensics and detection of C.S.I. Better still, look at this summer’s new hit mystery series, Monk.

From square one, Adrian Monk’s detection style has been called "that Zen Sherlock Holmes thing," and indeed it is. Observation, deduction, a "common-man" sidekick, irritated members of the official police force, colorful mysteries --- Monk is Sherlock Holmes. Of course, we must make him neurotic in the modern day to balance out his genius (Why does modern man seem to have such a problem with a hero of superior intellect without a fatal flaw to make us feel better about our own puny brains? Are we that insecure?)

After years of listening to people prattle on about how Sherlock Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction would never work in the modern day with no Victorian sleeve-hankies, rope-callused hands, and the like, Monk is a refreshing argument to the contrary. He does the Holmes tricks in the modern day, and they work fine.

So why do we have a Monk TV series and not a Sherlock Holmes show?

It’s almost like the hassle of the few remaining copyrights and the accompanying issue of "character rights" here in America are stifling such a project. (Note that those goofy Matt Frewer movies are coming out of Canada.) We almost seem to be back in the days when characters like "Mr. Mycroft" and "Solar Pons" had to stand in for a copyright-enchained Sherlock Holmes. Rumors of a Daryl Zero series spinning off the movie The Zero Effect only add to this feeling. Where’s our Sherlock?

That may be the one mystery that Monk doesn’t solve on his show.

But on Monk goes, week after week, mixing Sherlock Holmes with neurosis in a recipe that appeals to Sherlockians and non-Sherlockians alike. Sure, we can’t hear Holmes complain about the crime scene being old and the herd of police footprints that have obscured so much evidence, but when Monk does the same thing, the echoes are certainly pleasing to the Sherlocian ear . . . maybe even moreso than Joe Bell’s faux historical detection on Murder Rooms. Better to be based on Sherlock than have Sherlock based on you, I guess.

So I guess we have to be happy with what Sherlock-style detection we get. But one would hope that somebody somewhere might take the hint that all these non-Sherlock Sherlock shows are providing.

Give us Sherlock Holmes!

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver