As Media Mutations 6 is coming up, we are delighted to post in advance all the abstracts of the papers accepted for our conference. Enjoy your reading and feel free to write for any information about the conference to paolo.noto2 (at) unibo.it.
A Case of Identity: Sherlock and Elementary
Roberta Pearson (University of Nottingham)
The BBC television series Sherlock, created by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, premiered in 2010, with series two following in 2012 and series three in 2014. The CBS television series Elementary, created by Rob Doherty and starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, premiered in 2012, with season two following in 2013. Both are adaptations of the same source material, the four novels and fifty six short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the world’s first consulting detective. Yet both television series diverge widely not only from each other but from the source text; Sherlock updates the characters to contemporary London, while Elementary updates the characters to contemporary New York City and turns Watson into a woman. Sherlock is a dazzling and inventive example of what Mittell terms ‘narrative complexity’ while Elementary bears a strong family resemblance to CBS’s many other police procedurals.
This paper will interrogate the industrial and reception factors that contribute to the divergences between the two texts, focusing primarily on the difference in the relative cultural position of British public service and American commercial television. Even in the age of convergence and audience fragmentation the BBC still retains a central position in British life and culture as attested to by Sherlock’s status as event television, attracting over thirty per cent of the audience and much media publicity. By contrast, the centrality of the major commercial networks to American life and culture has been much diminished by convergence and audience fragmentation. Elementary, even though doing well in the ratings, attracts only five per cent of the audience and relatively little media publicity. The analysis will touch on the conference themes of narrative models and industrial structures as well as of new forms of monetization (in terms of Sherlock ancillary texts like the game app).
Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, whose research interests include American and British television as well as iconic cultural figures and forms such as Shakespeare, Batman and Star Trek. Her book, Star Trek and American Television, will be published by the University of California Press in the spring of 2014. She has also published several articles on Sherlock Holmes fans and texts and is planning a major monograph on the contemporary production and reception of Sherlockian texts.
