I recently started watching the first the season of the BBC’s Sherlock, a contemporary adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It is an interesting, well-directed, and well-acted series. Benedict Cumberbatch goes directly to the quick (near manic) core of Holmes, while Martin Freeman imbues Dr. Watson with a smart stoicism that the character truly has in the stories.

I’ve read a fair few of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. They are, as a rule, not great, and often not even good books. Much like the series featuring Holmes’s modern day descendent Dr. Gregory House, what is generally entertaining about them is watching the primary character interact in eccentric ways. Did anyone who tuned in to House really care about the formulaic medical mysteries? I was never a regular viewer but when I caught an episode I was far more interested in Hugh Laurie’s acerbic character than anything going on in the patient’s case. Holmes is pretty much the same. As plots go, both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four aren’t very compelling. The Hound of the Baskervilles is better, and is certainly more atmospheric. But Holmes and his relationship with Watson are often worth the price of admission.

Despite, these issues there are several reasons not to dismiss Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy out of hand. First, as I’ve mentioned there are Holmes and Watson, two characters who are incredible interesting. Holmes, the manic cocaine-injecting genius, and Watson the skeptical medical man of no little intellect. Their relationship is characteristic of the literary period and genre, as inhabiting that continuum that Eve Kosofsky Sedwick defines between homosocial and homoerotic. Holmes, in particular is attached to Waston lamenting his friends relationship with Mary Morsten at the end of The Sign of the Four, and the “bias” marriage provides. It shouldn’t be surprisingly that Doyle ends up dispatching of Mrs. Morsten off-stage in-between texts in order to get his two detectives back together again in liberated bachelorhood.

Another reason, perhaps the primary reason, that the Sherlock Holmes books are interesting is their status as cultural objects that exist within a network of cultural influences. The books say a great deal about Doyle and his readers’ understandings of Britain, Empire, its neighbors in America, and numerous other subjects germane to anyone involved in the study of European culture. A Study in Scarlet, for instance, provides a window into contemporary views of Mormonism, while The Sign of the Four offers some highly charged visions of the Indian Rebellion and Empire in general.

The final reason, one which is still prevalent in adaptation and additions to the Holmes cannon today, is the way in which the characters seem to transcend their status as literary figure. Thomas Leitch, in his excellent book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents writes

There have been so many different ways for the film industry to adjust its literary sources to the requirements of different audiences, institutions, and conventions in hopes of increasing its profits that adjustment might seem not only the dominant but the sole model for adaptation. One model that sounds similar but is quite different is based on Elliott’s “de(re)composing concept,” in which “film and novel decompose, merge, and form a new composition at ‘underground’ levels of reading. The adaptation is a composite of textual and filmic signs merging an audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives and often leads to confusion as to which is novel and which is film.” The leading example in English-language cinema is the Sherlock Holmes franchise, whose every new addition adds and deforms material in the hope that it will become an indistinguishable part of the canonical franchise.

This, I think, is the most interesting part of the Holmes series, the way in which it has expanded far beyond the bounds of Doyle’s work. The recent films by Guy Ritche as well as the BBC’s Sherlock television series are all participants in this process. While both the BBC series and Ritchie’s films are based on the characters, they are not straight adaptations of particular storylines in most cases. While a few of the Sherlock episodes rework storylines from the novels or stories they are heavily transfigured; the Guy Ritche films are even further afield from the originary works, though they seek to maintain a certain canonicity in representation of character and in gestures towards particular narrative elements.

The two adaptations are notable for at least one more thin:, they rescue one particular element from the originary works that has been heavily altered (Leitch might say deformed) by previous filmic interventions into the material. These new adaptations have turned Watson from the bumbling sidekick of former adaptations, to a stronger, smarter, and more interesting character. For now at least this newer Watson (one which reflects the source material much more closely) has emerged as a thread in the ever-expanding franchise.