. . . No, making a character immature and beset by personality problems hardly distinguishes a crime drama today. Creating a mature and sensible protagonist would be the truly trailblazing course today.
In this respect, the Holmes of Elementary is very unlike the original. Doyle's Holmes was not self-absorbed or immature. He was intensely interested in others, if only as sometimes rather abstract pieces in the grand puzzle that is the world of human relations. His withdrawal into himself on regular occasions was in the service of concentrating his faculties on the problems before him—it was in service of others, then. The self-absorption of the Holmes in Elementary, by contrast, is of the common contemporary type: modern adolescent narcissism. — S. T. Karnick, THE AMERICAN CULTURE (November 1, 2012)
Category: Detective fiction
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