A Study in BBC’s Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes is a household name and has been for over the past few decades. The fictional detective with his sidekick Dr. John Watson go about Europe catching bad guys, using logic of deduction, and getting in the oddest situations. The first story came out in 1891 and ever since, the readers have been in love with the franchise. The directive has spawned different interpretations and mediums of telling his stories. There have been books, comics, plays, movies, music videos, video games, and of course T.V. shows. One of which is BBC’s Sherlock. First airing in the United Kingdom on BBC, the show came about in 2010 and is still ongoing with a total of 13 episodes spanning currently 4 seasons. The programs stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson, Martin also played Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit trilogy and Benedict in the movies played Smug the dragon. The show has been an international hit! The new adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fictional detective with modern visual design, production value and worldwide distribution, and the reimagined story telling of the adventures of Holmes and Watson the BBC has a hit show with a diverse growing fan base and may make the character more popular than ever before.

The current television program has some of Europe’s best film makers working on it. The visual design of the show is proof enough of how serious the production is taken. As with most shows, there is more than one cinematographer. Each will swap out for different episodes. This modern-day Sherlock is a marvel of cinematography. They used every shot imaginable. Sherlock was not only a genius detective but also a drug addict, so most of how he solves cases takes place in is head and while high on cocaine because it helps him think faster. So, they can use shots that resemble what is going on in his head to show how his mind works. There are shots from beneath him, him walking up and down the walls of his home, and so many more brilliant angles to show his mind’s eye. When the show is not inside his mind but outside, they use a lot of wide angle shots, have the target further away from the camera, slow dolly shots and it creates the air of mystery and something far away. And it is Sherlock’s job to get close enough to it in his mind’s eye and solve the case, so that in the real world the camera can get closer and reveal the twist on who did it and why. Of course, there are lighter hearted moments of regular people meeting and chit chat but they too are not very close to the camera mostly medium shots. The only time there is a close up was when Sherlock is high and t. There are a few odd ball ones thrown into the mix of John but so few. The cinematography does a splendid job of showing what the inside of Sherlock’s mind was like and it also being very disorientating because it was so messed up from the drugs. To help with the illusion was the editing. All the episodes have the same technique as a classic show like fade to black, jump cuts, and so on but the series is special in that each episode there was one special editing technique used to give it a different feel and to produce how Sherlock was seeing things. In the “Sign of Three” episode they used the bullet time effect. It was almost like time stood still while the camera moved around. The SMS technique was used in every episode. Most of the time on a show, if a show wants to know what message the character is reading, they show the text of the paper or phone, sometimes having the character read it out loud. In Sherlock, the text was shown on screen like a text box to the side of the character who is reading or writing it. The same is done in Sherlock’s mind when he i deducing something. He can read people like he could a book, so let say when he look at a girl he may see cat hair on her jacket, a tan line on her ring finger, and to what side her windblown hair is on. With that there will be a text overlay saying, “cat fur, tan line, recently separated? London” these are all the deductions he was making in his mind and with the text over lay we can read but he is thinking. There are some techniques they used for falling, which makes them look like they are falling in slow-motion but it is really in real-time and the actor is just in a mechanical body cradle. They also use freeze frame shots a lot. Sherlock and his reality were frozen in time but there was one thing able to move around. The editing goes great with the cinematography. The sound is normal in my perspective. Sometimes in shots they may muffle a voice or make the voice sound like static. Some things may have an echo like a gun shot, coin landing on the ground, or a car horn. The mise-en-scene is brilliant as well. Sherlock wore a big black overcoat which seems to be his thing and it was even pointed out in the show that it is hiss trope. He dressed well and looks put together, same with Watson but they are both a different clothing styles. The show even manages to get the signature Sherlock and Watson hats incorporated into the TV program which the fans loved. A nod to the classic novels. Sherlock’s home is like his mind packed with a lot of interesting things but super cluttered. It’s the acting that is so impressive. It must be hard to play Sherlock a self-proclaimed high functioning sociopath but Benedict Cumberbatch seems to play it so well. He is a well-composed character with bits of true insanity mixed in. He does not truly know social etiquette, for example, telling a kid about a murder; the kid asked to see the picture and he shows him, seeing nothing wrong or inappropriate about it. Sherlock even does extensive research on how to be the best man at Watsons wedding. So, benedict really has to work to get into that kind of headspace. And Martin Freeman is the guy who has to act out the person who is Sherlock’s best friend and sometimes babysitter. They both did a remarkable justice to the role and Freeman won a Best Supporting Actor award from the first episode. They both won 66th Primetime Emmy Award Benedict Cumberbatch in Outstanding Lead Actor in a miniseries or a movie and Martin Freeman with Outstanding Supporting Actor in a miniseries or a movie. The only reason that the visual effect of this series is so good is because of its production.

There are many cameras used in the television production to create the bullet time effect; they used over 40 cameras all at once. The first season was shot on a Sony CineAlta F35 while other seasons have used ARRI Alexa cameras. “Season four episodes usually rely on two Alexa cameras, while Kidd sometimes adds a Canon Cinema EOS C300 as what he calls a “trick camera.” He notes, “It is lightweight and I can get in position quickly even in tight surroundings. That’s what is needed when you customize to facilitate a particular approach, and I’ll often shoot those angles myself.”” Sherlock is primarily shot on location but they do use a studio for filming all of the scenes inside of Sherlock’s home. They have the entire house set up inside of Upper Boat Studios outside of Cardiff, England. The locational scenes all mainly take place in and around London like the outside of their apartment. They used a real hospital in the scenes where they are in laboratories for the police department and where Sherlock fakes his suicide. The show was constantly on the move. With all the cameras, actors, props and way more the cost really adds up. Each episode cost around $2.67 million to make, which is a lot less than American made televisions shows. In comparison, it took about 8 million to make a Game of Thrown episode. However, in one year with all the Sherlock shows and merch made over 1billion pounds. The distribution of the show comes on many platforms which helped boost these profits. Most notably is that Sherlock is available on Netflix. There is also Hulu and Amazon Prime from streaming services. It is available on BBC channel for those who have it. One can buy individual or season on ITunes. BBC also has a YouTube channel, so anything they post on the videos will generate money. Moreover, it is a smart way of interacting with their fans and getting feedback too.

Most episodes of Sherlock follow this traditional narrative structure. Sherlock and Watson are doing nothing at the start of the episode. Sometimes they are reading, playing violin, or having tea. Then enter someone or something that creates a case for the two to solve. They start out to find the answers and get the bad guy. This continues until they find their answers and catch the bad guys. When the case was solved and all goes “back to normal” Sherlock and Watson went back to what they were doing at the start of the episode until another case comes along. Each episode can be watched on its own and it will be fine to anyone who does not follow the show. However, the stories do all tie together or little Easter eggs in each episode, so watching it all in order will give the viewer a greater understanding of why and how thing came to be and are. Because this is one of the most viewed shows of the time, it is hard to pinpoint the demographics for this show. Through some online polls, people were able to find out this and how they watch the show. Here are some of the facts “General fans range in age from 14-60, both genders, fans active in the fandom range from 16-25 and are mostly female, nearly a 1/3 of respondents to a survey showed a devotion to Star Benedict Cumberbatch (reason for participation), most fans are from USA or Europe (mostly UK), Numerous active Fan Blogs / Sites across multiple mediums: Blogs, Tumblrs, Twitters, Forums/boards.” These are the demographics and they get much deeper but this is the broad idea of who is watching, where, and why. The younger subset was the fraction that really pushed the franchise to where it was by obsessively watching, buying merchandise, and promoting the series to friends and strangers on different social media platforms. These viewers are in a collective group called a fandom. A fandom is, “the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, etc., regarded collectively as a community or subculture.” It is really hard to dissect a fandom because of all the subsections of a different fandom. There are casual fans who may watch regularly and there are fans who have a whole room covered in merchandise, wear fan merchandise, go to conventions dressed as characters, and write fan fictions dedicated to their fandom. The show brings all types of people together and creates a community some people may not know they even belong too.

The adaptation of the classic novels to modern television of course is going to be different but most of the episodes are a reference to one of the cases Sherlock worked on in the books. The first episode of Sherlock was A Study in Pink and one of the first cases Sherlock and Watson worked on together in the novels was A Study in Scarlet. The first episode starts off pretty similar to the beginning of the first book. John Watson, a recently returned military doctor, who was wounded in the Middle East war, came back to London. Watson and Sherlock was pretty much the same, they met in the book with Sherlock beating a corpse to see if bruising occurs. The similarity in the TV show is that Sherlock plays the violin and uses it when in deep thought. A lot of the same elements from the book ended up in the show like the murdering occurring from poison pills, the victim forced to choose the bottle of pills to take. At the crime scene, the letters “RACHE” were written and the murderer being a taxi driver with an aneurism. Now for the differences in the show, Sherlock scoffs at the idea of “RACHE” meaning revenge in German and says it is meant to be Rachel and uses it to unlock a phone. In the book, the word was meant to be revenge in German but to throw off the police into thinking this was a political killing. In the book, the killer’s motive was for revenge and not for money and feeling superior like in the show. Also, the show focused more on the relationship between Sherlock and Watson more than the book did. In the book, there were no mentions of many of the characters in the show like Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, Moriarty, Molly Hooper, or Mrs. Hudson. Though in later books, some of those characters come back but some are made up just for the show like Molly. The title of this episode is a nod to the original title. The title name is created by Watson and how he titled this case on his blog. He called it that because the first victim is dressed all in pink and has a pink suitcase. In the book, it was Sherlock who came up with the title for their editorial in the news saying, “…a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon? There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” So, with its own modern twists and how to make the story fit into a television show, there were changes made I believe the first episode did a splendid job using its source material to its fullest and adding more to it that made it work well for viewing audiences.

It's been more than 125 years since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print, but devotion to fiction's greatest detective hasn't decreased. This has always been an insanely popular franchise. When the original Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to end the series by killing off Sherlock, there was such a backlash that he brought him back in a grand way and was once again loved by the public. The TV show is doing the same thing by its vast popularity. The show does so well in bringing in a huge diverse viewership by some many different ways. The cinematography in my opinion is some of the best I have seen for television. It makes me want to really be there to see how things are done. It also really takes me into a different head space. It confuses me and draws me in which is how Sherlock is and his mind thinks. The production value of the show is amazing too. In America, we have to pay and put so much money into every episode but in the UK, their cost productions are way beneath ours. I am not sure if that is due to the currency over there, the cost of their items, or just more thrifty and creative with their cash but it is very impressive. I love this show pretty much everything about it except one thing. The time it takes for them to make it. There are four seasons and only 14 episodes. In the UK, their TV shows are almost like movies being around 45-95 minutes long. So, each episode takes about the same amount of time to shoot it. That is just the style over there and there is a joke about why British people are more patient than Americans because they have to wait 6 months for an episode to come out. Other than that, and me being impatient for the next episode it is a truly awe-inspiring show and is highly subjected. The new adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fictional detective with modern visual design, production value and worldwide distribution, and the reimagined story telling of the adventures of Holmes and Watson the BBC has a hit show with a diverse growing fan base and may make the character more popular than ever before.

Works Cited

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Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. London: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.

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