I should have asked “Sherlock” co-creator Stephen Moffat if he follows the first rule of showbiz, “Always leave them wanting more,” because that’s what he’s done with both seasons of the popular reinterpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” mystery stories.
After a highly successful first season that drew 4.6 million viewers per each of three episodes on PBS’ “Masterpiece Mystery!” last summer, the sleuth is back for three more installments (8 p.m. May 6, 13 and 20, WTTW in Chicago; 4 stars).
I can guarantee that by the end of “The Reichenbach Fall” on May 20, viewers will want to jump in the time machine featured in Moffat’s other wildly popular series, “Doctor Who,” and be transported to whatever date “Sherlock” Season 3 begins.
All three of the new stories, beginning Sunday with “A Scandal in Belgravia” and continuing May 13 with “The Hounds of Baskerville” before the May 20 finale, dazzle with imagination, wit and outstanding lead performances from Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, Andrew Scott as Sherlock’s arch enemy, James Moriarty, and Lara Pulver as his latest obsession, the dominatrix Irene Adler.
Going into Season 2, Moffat and co-creator Mark Gatiss kept what Detective Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) said about Holmes in the first season in mind: “Sherlock Holmes is a great man and one day, if we’re very lucky, he might be a good one.”
“This is sort of his journey,” Moffat told me during a phone interview. “When we see the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes [from the 1940s], he’s completely accomplished and heroic and amazing and brilliant and the mighty sage of Baker Street. The Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes is still in the foothills of that. He’s a bit autistic. He’s a bit rude. He’s more vulnerable because of those things. He’s still wondering whether he’s a psychopath. He’s all those things.
“So this year is a big step forward for him in becoming the great man—or a good man—that Lestrade thinks he can be.”
Moffat answered more questions about the new season, comparing Sherlock to Doctor Who and how Scott’s marvelous take on Moriarty changed the writers’ plans for the character.
http://www-tc.pbs.org/s3/pbs.videoportal-prod.cdn/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swfWatch Sherlock, Season 2 – Preview on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.
What’s in store for Sherlock this season?
Yes, people have talked about it being sort of almost a humanizing of him. But it’s more like it’s almost like Sherlock growing up, I suppose. He’s exposed to the big emotions. He encounters those deadly things of love and fear and loss, I suppose, is what he encounters, and, of course, he would emerge yet even stronger…
It’s funny you should bring up a Lestrade quote, because I was going to ask where that quote came from.
Well, that one’s ours. It’s not from the original. Yeah, it’s just we want that idea that Sherlock Holmes, even if you look at the original stories, Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” is humorless, autistic, cold, unpleasant. If you go a few stories later, he’s much warmer and funnier.
Now, he’s still a scary man. He’s still frightening. He’s still a bit psycho, but he’s become a lot more heroic. And by the time you get to [Doyle’s short story] “The Final Problem” [which is “The Reichenbach Fall” here] he’s moved so far from his original debut that he is prepared to lay down his life to stop Moriarty.
He’s become a hero. He’s become a good man, but a good man with considerable flaws, it must be said, and still a frightening and cold individual. But never forget that Sherlock Holmes is a hero and what we’re seeing is that hero being assembled year by year in our series.
It would be sort of impossible to write a show about a good man who had no flaws; it’d be kind of boring.
Well, I’m just trying to think. I suppose Superman has been quite a success and he’s pretty unflawed, isn’t he? I think there’s a version of it, but Sherlock Holmes has always been a sort of anti-hero. He’s always been someone who it was very clear that he’s not doing this in order to better the world; at least initially he isn’t. He’s doing it just because it amuses him and he only takes the cases that entertain him. But he does sort of move beyond that a bit.
How long did it take you to come up with the resolution to the Season 1 cliffhanger in “A Scandal in Belgravia”? READERS: You can watch the first 7 minutes of the episode at the PBS Facebook page and see what I am talking about.
See, we never really took our cliffhanger on Series 1 seriously. We changed it, I’ll tell you that. We just thought it was great fun. And we didn’t know the series was going to be a hit. We didn’t even know if we’d get a second run. And for ages, that episode ended with Moriarty departing and Sherlock saying, “At last, the game begins,” or something like that. His big conflict with Moriarty begins. I think I suggested, “Well, why don’t we just do something bigger and more explosive—a big standoff?”
But we didn’t take it that seriously, in the sense that I just thought it was such a standoff that they would just back away from each other realizing that they were at a stalemate. But then, of course, everybody went mad talking about that cliffhanger and so we talked a lot about what would be funny, what would be interesting, what’s the only thing you could do that would be surprising. The building blowing up is a bit corny.
And I suggested, at some point, “Well, why doesn’t his phone just ring?” Moriarty’s phone rings; that’s funny. And I told that to Sue, my wife who’s the producer, and she said, “Well, she’d just heard this very funny story that someone had gone to a funeral cremation and just at the point that the coffin was being lowered into the flames, someone’s mobile phone went off and it was “Staying Alive.” And I thought, “Well, that’s it!” So we used “Staying Alive.”
After that pitch of melodrama and all that music building up, it gets such a roar of laugher when the next thing you hear is the Bee Gees, so it’s all thanks to the wife as usual.
It’s brilliant. And speaking about laughs, let’s talk about Andrew Scott and his demented take on Moriarty, which I also love. Is that mostly Andrew or was that written in that way?
How it came about was, originally, the very, very original version of the first series you weren’t going to see Moriarty at all except in the role of gay Jim. If you remember he turns up and pretends to be Molly’s boyfriend who Sherlock deduces is gay. That was the only time you were going to see him and there wouldn’t be any big pool resolution. But we needed to cast someone for that part who could play the demented Moriarty, and we did want a demented one. We moved away from the original just because every super villain since Moriarty has been a carbon copy of him. And if we did another suave, restrained, silky, sinister Moriarty, it would seem like the biggest cliche. It’s never much of an excuse to say, but it’s the original cliche.
So we wanted to move away from that, so we wrote up an audition scene in which Moriarty was being mental and scary and venomous. We auditioned various people for the part and Andrew Scott was so good at doing it, so frightening, that we thought not only would we cast him but we’d write him in. We actually decided we’ll do the poolside scene because we wanted to showcase him.
And we’ll see more of him this season, too, right?
Oh, yes, you’ll see. You’ll see him in a very major way in the third one, yeah.
Tell me about Irene Adler, your sort of feelings about her and her being Sherlock’s counterpart in intelligence and their little battle in the first episode.
Well, it’s one of the standbys of Sherlock Holmes movies. It has always been giving him the sexy female antagonist that possibly underneath the layers of glacier he might find quite attractive. And that’s always been one of the absolute standbys and is really rather good. I’m thinking of “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” or the wonderfully barmy Spider Woman with Basil Rathbone. It’s always worked really well. And all those characters are sort of based on the original, which is Irene Adler, who, when you read the story, isn’t that bad or that clever. In fact, her big victory at the end is that she runs off with her husband and moves house. That’s what she does in the original.
And indeed, the thing when I was a kid, and maybe this is what I’m responding to when I read the story, Sherlock Holmes makes a big fuss about how clever she was and how much smarter she was than him. You read the story and think there’s no evidence of that at all in the original. You think, “No, Sherlock, you just fancied her and you don’t know that’s what you’re talking about.” [Laughs.]
We’ve taken Irene Adler and added to her all the iterations of her sins, in a way, as much more devilish character, a much more sexual character—well, she’s fairly sexy in the original—and really [made their relationship] into sort of this battle of wits that seems to be a kind of foreplay for the brainy. But that’s what it’s about and just letting Sherlock know it’s one of the stages of his development as a character, that he’s not immune to that sort of thing the way he thinks he is.
He usually comes off as asexual or at least disinterested in the other sex. It’s very interesting to see him be a little confused by her and his feelings toward her.
Yeah, I think it’s quite important to remember that Sherlock, in the original stories, is neither asexual nor unemotional. He’s quite an emotional man despite what he protests to the contrary. And what he says is he doesn’t want emotion and the whole business of romance to get in the way of his reasoning. He thinks if he allowed that into his life it would cause his brain to malfunction. You see, being gripped in a scientific instrument is what he says about it. He doesn’t want it.
So we just dramatized that. He meets Irene Adler and he’s a doofus for about an hour. He can’t cope with it. He’s right. He can’t allow this into the precision instrument of his intellect because it does cause him to malfunction.
How difficult or easier is it to take Conan Doyle’s stories and adapt them and modernize them than to write the original “Doctor Who” episodes?
We tend to take bits and pieces of the Doyle stories. What we we’re much more excited about is Doyle’s storytelling. He’s such a brilliant storyteller, just sticking to the principles of his characters. Most of his stories, the problem isn’t modernizing them at all. You can modernize them quite easily. You can modernize anything quite easily. The problem is they’re all about 20 minutes long. They’re all short stories.
So what we tend to do is cherry pick, or in the case of “A Scandal in Belgravia,” the first 20 minutes are sort of an adaptation of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” then it goes off into new territory because we’ve run out of story. In the case of “The Great Game,” Mark’s “The Great Game,” he took about five Conan Doyle stories and jammed them all together the way that the old Rathbone/Bruce movies used to do, which I think is the right way to do it. You take the sparkling jewels of the original and make a new thing out of them.
But we have no compunction about making up a brand new story. I think if you want Sherlock Holmes to be brand new you have to feel as though you tell your own stories. And what’s important about the original isn’t the detail of the story. It’s the detail of the characters and the style and as I say of storytelling principles of Doyle.
So it doesn’t feel, Sherlock, oddly enough, like doing an adaptation, even though we are in love with the source material and in love with the style of it. I suppose it feels exactly the same as “Doctor Who” because, in “Doctor Who,” we’re also adapting an original. You know, we didn’t invent it. It was there before we started. So it’s just about that kind of storytelling and that principle.
After Season 1 was such a big success, did that change things for when you sat down to start working on Season 2, more pressure? Did it change things once you started filming with the stars or anything?
People always ask if it’s more pressure and more stressful doing a second season when it’s been a hit. No, it’s not. It’s more joyous. It’s more exciting. You’re rubbing your hands with glee saying, “Wait until they see this.”
I’ll tell you. I have done the alternative. I’ve done a second series of something that was absolute flop and that’s stressful because you just sit there thinking how do we make people like it given that they already hate it. How are you going to persuade them that they like it this time? That was stress. Ignore what anyone has ever told you; success is not a burden and it is not a pain. It’s just enjoyable.
In terms of the filming, it’s completely different. People turn up, particularly if we’re shooting in pretend Baker Street. There’s a whole line of people with cameras waiting to get a glimpse of Benedict Cumberbatch. And, when we were out shooting the first year, and my wife knows more about this than I do, but it is that people would recognize Martin Freeman from “The Office.” He’s quite a big star in Britain and is about to be an even bigger star all over the world, of course, [with “The Hobbit”] but not have the have the faintest idea who Benedict Cumberbatch was. He was as anonymous as me and possibly more so. Then, suddenly, in the space of 90 minutes, when that first episode went out, and he of course became the hottest actor in Britain, which was extraordinary.
So how would you compare Sherlock as a character to the Doctor?
Ah, the old, old question. I sometimes wonder do they really even have to be compared. But, actually, the big thing they’ve got in common is that they’re quirky and they’re so of anti-heroes, I suppose. But beyond that is there much? They’re hugely clever. They’re both hugely clever.
But the Doctor is lovely. He’s a lovely, lovely alien, at least on the surface and quite a long way underneath, he’s lovely. The line I always come out with is the Doctor is like an angel who aspires to be human, whereas Sherlock Holmes is like a man who aspires to be a god. So they’re tunneling in different directions and have different ambitions. Sherlock disdains all the business of humanity and wants to grow past it. The Doctor wants to go to a fairground and have fun. He loves all that. Sherlock is in love with his super intelligence, and, of course, the Doctor is even more super intelligent and is completely indifferent to it, in a way. He doesn’t really mind. He just wants to have fun and help people and lark about.
You can read what Moffat told me about the upcoming season of “Doctor Who” and his plans for the 50th anniversary at this previous post: “Doctor Who” shockers
