Mick Hartley

I only watched the first of the latest Sherlock series. I never much liked it, (see here and here for earlier reactions) but sometimes you check stuff out as much as anything because it's good to keep abreast of what everyone else is watching. But one was enough.

In place of the classic detective story, where you're alongside the great crime solver as they try to make sense of the evidence in the most logical way – the detective story, that is, whose rules were laid down as much as anyone else by Conan Doyle – we have a show which defies analysis. You think you've made sense of it when – whoosh! – along comes another twist which completely changes everything. After a while your only choice is to give up thinking, and just sit back and marvel at how clever the programme makers are. Or, as in my case, give up in disgust. The point the programme wishes to make is, not that logic and reason can solve the crime, but that Sherlock – or rather the team making the TV series Sherlock – works at a level beyond anything you could possibly manage (superSherlock) so you better give up thinking and sit there open-mouthed, as wonder follows shock follows wonder. It's like Doctor Who: magical detective stories for teenagers.

And the Sherlock – Moriarty rivalry is more like a playground sneer contest than a battle between two supposedly great minds.

Also, we learn, it's not even about the crimes. As we saw in that first programme – the one I watched – the crime (man disappears, found dead in car) is of no interest. The real dramas are absurd sub-Bond spy machinations which may or may not have happened to members of Sherlock's inner circle, and, above all, Sherlock's family psychodramas. Can he feel? Can he love?? Does he need some psychotherapy???

Liel Leibovitz was similarly unimpressed:

The premise of the fourth—and, by most reports, final—season of the show, which concluded on Sunday night, was jarring: There are other Holmes siblings, and they are the smart ones. Sherlock, he of the deerstalker and the mind palace, is triumphant simply because he can empathize, a fact that is driven home again and again in sepia-toned flashbacks of the celebrated deducer at 6, looking adorable in knee-length shorts and curls.

It’s hard to discuss this premise any further without spoiling the twists and turns of a season rich with them, but if the previous paragraph strikes you as strange, well, it’s because it is: We love Sherlock, have always loved him, because he’s the embodiment of pure reason and a solver of really difficult mysteries, not because he’s super good at resolving family conflicts and diligent about working out his repressed childhood memories.

Such emotional overindulgence not only robs one of popular culture’s most astute thinkers of his wits, but also forces us all into an infantile state in which all focus is always on the self and its constant, nagging needs. Like Pope Lenny [Jude Law in The Young Pope], whose tastes—he only drinks Cherry Coke Zero—and his attachment to Sister Mary, the nun who raised him from boyhood, both suggest that he’d never quite gotten around to the task of growing up, Sherlock, too, is another child replaying his earliest traumas on a much more lavish stage.

What would a young and conservative pope do if placed on the throne? How would the world’s greatest detective use his powers to combat anything from Russian hackers to Islamist terrorists? These are fascinating questions, but we’ll never know the answers. Instead of men, the gods of prime time have given us two simpering boys, and instead of great and good dramas that explore all that is human and terrifying and hopeful about our struggling species, we’ve just more gilt and noise.

Is it any wonder, then, that we elected a president who is swayed primarily by the gravitational pull of raucous cable news? And is it really surprising that when our turn came to fulfill our supreme civic duty so many of us ended up voting for the person who’s been chewing the scenery on NBC for 14 seasons? Responsibility, empathy, decency—none of these comes naturally. They are learned, slowly and painstakingly, at home and in school but also by means of a cultural osmosis of sorts, by belonging to a community that sets up standards and insists that we abide or else. But when our entertainment so often implies that those who’ve matured are bores and those who still cry out for attention are worthy of it, when we can think of no other approach to fiction than one that showcases self-centered twits, when the outraged and the outrageous are all you see and hear, the thrust toward maturity stops. Like the young pope and the weepy sleuth, we’re all children now, and the president we elected, like the TV shows we spend so much time parsing, are the ones we deserve.

I'm not sure I'd make quite the same leap to Trump there, but it's at least worth a think.