« An Englishman in New York »: actualisation, effets de Canon et transgressions dans Elementary de Robert Doherty (CBS, 2012-)

• Main Author: Denis Mellier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2015-06-01
• Series: TV Series
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/278

In constant expansion, the galaxy of Sherlock Holmes’s apocryphal suites has never ceased, since 1896, to produce new avatars placing the Baker Street detective in new places and times, confronting him to various social, ideological and technological forms, in a process that is much less one of adaptation than one of actualization. Such move is the grounding principle of CBS’s television series, Elementary (2012-), in which Sherlock is a consultant for the NYPD, living in Brooklyn in 2010 and sharing his Brownstone house with doctor… Joan Watson! Does this actualization proceed from an iconoclastic effect towards the canon, playing again the conventional formulas of the myth in a subversive mode in order to shock the purists, to scour the haughty Britishness of the original character, willing to seduce the digital natives with highly subversive, tattooed, sexually transgressive and high tech geek Holmes? Or is the game more subtle and less binary, weaving together the imaginary values of the original figure and an intermedia use of fictions finding in a contemporary context the ingredients for emancipation and singularities. Thus, one should reverse the question of actualization: by using a seductive game of moves and reformulations, Sherlock in NY may appear as a metadiscursive figure which could shape the conflictual relationships between contemporary visual culture and a virtuoso’s hermeneutics test. Such a question may have particular relevance, in our times when TV series have abdicated to the authority of forensics, to mentalists or profilers, all those neo-positivist forms of thinking, the esthetico-logical sport of thought and a practise of analytics as sheer virtuosity.