Entertainment

In world of ‘Elementary,’ Holmes & Watson didn’t exist

‘ELEMENTARY,’ MY DEAR WATSON: Lucy Liu (left) stars as Watson and Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes. (
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There’s a reason that no one in “Elementary” ever cocks an eyebrow at the mentions of lead character Sherlock Holmes and his caretaker, Joan Watson.

You’d think that two people who just happen to share the names of the world’s most famous fictional detective, and his sidekick, would at least merit a “Holmes and Watson? C’mon.”

But, in the world of “Elementary,” the characters invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never existed — only the brilliant, transplanted British sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), the fallen surgeon hired to keep her drug-addicted charge on the straight and narrow in modern-day New York.

“Our show exists in a universe in which there was, tragically, no Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” says “Elementary” creator/executive producer Rob Doherty. “The idea that there was a Sherlock Holmes in the Victorian Era, who was created by Conan Doyle and who’s now someone in New York . . . was specifically an element of the show that was never really in our heads.”

In the freshman CBS series, Holmes — who once used his brilliant deductive powers to help Scotland Yard — is now bidding for sobriety in New York City after his UK career was short-circuited by drug addiction and hints of a broken romance. In Manhattan, he’s reunited with New York cop Tobias Gregson (Aidan Quinn) and hired as a consultant to the NYPD.

The quirky, irascible Holmes lives in a swank townhouse, paid for by his absentee father, with Joan Watson, who abandoned her medical career after the death of a patient for which she felt responsible.

Watson, hired by Holmes’ father to keep a constant watch over his son, tags along on his cases — her medical knowledge often coming in handy.

“For us it was really about taking this very iconic character and putting him in a new place,” says Doherty. “It was less about the era and more about the setting — moving Sherlock to New York.

“I’m a fan of Holmes myself, and when I read the original books as a kid, there were things I just missed — primarily his drug use and his relationships with women, or lack thereof,” Doherty says.

“These were fascinating details that were important elements of Holmes and . . . we saw the opportunity to . . . take Sherlock’s drug use to the nth degree and to see what happened if we put him in a dark place. And if we dared move him to any other city in the world, it would be New York City, which has so much in common with London.”

And, Doherty admits, it would’ve been a hard sell if Conan Doyle’s character did exist in the world of “Elementary.”

“It would be one of the most coincidental coincidences in the history of coincidence,” he jokes. “One of the closest things we had in the pilot [to the original Holmes] was Joan’s reaction to the name ‘Sherlock.’

“Assuming that Conan Doyle wasn’t around to write these books, ‘Sherlock’ is a very unusual name, and we felt we owed Joan some sort of explanation . . . with Sherlock explaining that it meant he was born with light hair.”