Elementary Season 1 Disc 6

Episode 21: A Landmark Story
The first time we met a surrogate of Moriarty, not the man himself, presuming he is a man and that she is not a woman. But, of course we don't know this right away, we believe that this particular killer is a serial killer, not an assassin. In fact we don't even know there is a Moriarty until the end, we only know there is a killer who uses the moniker M. Of course the educated audience is expecting the M to stand for Moararty, but it doesn't.
Moriarty is back. Kind of. A man dies of a suspected heart attack and a whole chain of events lead to uncovering other assassins used by Moriarty, each very different from the last. One of these men was an engineer and specializes in killing people in a way that makes it look like an accident.
There is no secondary story going on this time and we get to see Holmes and Watson work on their issues in only one light. It was actually a nice change of pace and done quite well.

Episode 22: Risk Management
This is really the second part of the last episode, as it begins immediately after the conclusion of the last one, which ends with Moriarty calling Holmes. This episode begins with the twist of the phone call continuing and Moriarty asking to hire Holmes to find a killer.
Captain Gregson tries to get Watson to leave because it is too dangerous and at a later point, Holmes tries to misdirect her for her own protection. She will have none of it, rightly stating that if she is not into being a detective all the way, including possible personal danger that she is only playing at it and that they are behaving overly defensively because she is a woman.
Throughout the whole episode, Holmes is at least least one step behind Moriarty and they both know it. As you can imagine this is quite a blow to Holmes ego, but for the most part he puts it aside because the game they are playing is getting him closer to his goal of finding Moriarty to avenge Irene, Holmes murdered girlfriend. Of course, the end of the episode is a game changer.

Episode 23: The Woman/Heroine
Finally we got to the big season closer, a double length episode none-the-less. As you might have guessed from the descriptions of the previous two episodes, this is all about Holmes versus Morirarty. Every single time the two go tet-a-tet, Moriarty wins. That does not change in this episode as Morirarty forces a well known Greek Nationalist with a shady past to commit a crime to save his daughter, and the crime causes a fluctuation in the currency market of Macedonia so that Moriarty makes nearly a billion dollars. Meanwhile, Homes knows what is going on but is powerless to stop it as he is always one step behind.
Holmes is able to figure out Moriarty's involvement and to find evidence proving what he is saying, but it is still too late each time to prevent the loss of life. Not that catching murderers is a bad thing, mind you, it's just that Holmes feels that he should have been able to prevent them.
I don't think I spoil anything by saying that Moriarty lets Holmes that he has been bested and that in every possible meeting of the two that Moriarty will always defeat Holmes, which Holmes knows to be true. But by your powers of deduction, you should already see what I'm saying with this and know what happens in the episode. I won't belittle your mental capabilities by stating the obvious.

Elementary Season 1 Disc 5

Episode 17: Possibility Two
I took a little break from watching episodes, almost completely not related to this show. Coming back to it after a little break was good, and also well timed. This episode fully breaks from the old way of doing things in that Watson is a now a full-time detective-in-training. It was fun to watch Holmes call her on something in front of the police and everyone, because she would just stumble along trying to hobble something together. She didn't get it right every time, and even when she did get it right, she only got most of it right. But, she didn't quit and she didn't complain. You can see why she would have been a kick-ass surgeon.
The story itself indirectly touched on this and all procedurals, especially forensics based ones. In this episode, a geneticist created a fake blood sample that was a perfect match for a particular and because he knew his business, it matched all 13 markers perfectly. Case closed, right? Wrong. Acting upon his suspicions, Holmes called in a favor to do further testing and they discovered that while the 13 markers used by law enforcement were a match, there were no other makers at all, of which there should have been hundreds or thousands. Very interesting.

Episode 18: Deja Vu All Over Again
Watson had her first case! And her first arrest! And was arrested for the first time! What? Ya, it was crazy like that.
Ms. Watson took on her first case, at Holmes bidding. He thought it was a pretty straight-forward missing person based upon the evidence that he had at the time, but it turned South quickly. Not only was homicide involved in the disappearance, but a seemingly random murder that no one would have thought was related turned out to be, but not in the way that it obvious. There were definitely some clever little twists in this one.

Episode 19: Snow Angels
The lesson of this episode is just how far you can get by saying that you are a consultant for the police and having some cash to back up your requests when telling the person about the police fails to get the job done. Holmes and Watson were able to get around a locked-down New York and out to East Rutherford New Jersey to investigate the crime, and they did it with minimal trouble. They even got into the Federal Reserve bank and into restricted areas. Of course it helps that they actually do consult for the police and were correct about what was going on, but the right type of con man or con woman would be able to do the same thing I would think. That might just be a very interesting show to watch - the episode where Holmes and Watson must find the people playing at being Holmes and Watson.

Episode 20: Dead Man's Switch
We got a look at Holmes very personal side as we approached his one year sobriety anniversary. He does not want to receive recognition for this act and gives all kinds of reasons but it it obvious to Watson that there is something else going on and eventually he confides in her before he tells his sponsor that it hadn't actually been a year, that the day after he quit drugs, he snuck out and did them one last time. Holmes is deeply ashamed of himself and incredibly embarrassed that he could not will himself to stop and stick with it - that he actually gave-in to his desires.
Holmes very personal trials were counterposed with a story of blackmail and a victim of blackmail becoming a blackmailer himself when he realized just how much money there was to be made. Holmes states early on that to him blackmailers may be more foul than murderers, to which no one responds. This made me think towards the end of the episode as the culprit is being revealed, that the only thing worse than a blackmailer would be someone who was being blackmailed and truly understood just how horrible it was to be the victim, that person switching to becoming the blackmailer himself.

Elementary Season 1 Disc 4a

Episode 13: The Red Team
This was Elementary's stab at conspiracy theories. I think. It was another spy story, well Intelligence story more than spy story. It's about the way the Intelligence community operates and people who play that game. With the usual twists and turns, I didn't really know where this one was going at all.
This episode was also about Holmes getting back in with Captain Gregson after the whole incident in the previous episode. Their relationship is forever changed as Gregson can not get over the fact that Holmes was ready to murder someone. The Captain reinstates Holmes but tells him that things are different now and that he'll never really trust Holmes again. Then Gregson punches Holmes in the stomach saying htat there was something he wanted to get off his min.

Episode 14: The Deductionist
This episode is a little different in that there are two mysteries going on simultaneously. There is the main mystery - an escaped serial killer who is out to get the FBI profiler who put him away, but not because of that, because she wrote a book that lead to his father committing suicide. The second mystery is why Watson is getting kicked out of her apartment. The interesting part of both mysteries is that there is a tie between Holmes and the main mystery and Watson and the second mystery.
In the main mystery, Holmes has a personal history with the famous profiler, who had once been his lover, but now his almost enemy since she had profiled him for a scientific journal. Watson, obviously has a link to the second mystery since it's about getting kicked out of her apartment, but that's not what I meant. It mirrors Holmes link in that someone she has known for a long time and trusts - the building handyman - is involved in the activity that is getting her kicked out, even as he is delivering the message that she is getting kicked out.

Episode 15: A Giant Gun Filled With Drugs
Let me just do a mental rundown to be sure, but. Yes. No one was murdered in this episode. That is a definite milestone and I hope harbinger of things to come. Not that I expect we'll be foregoing the episodic murders or anything, but there might be more episodes out there that focus on other crimes. It is nice to have a variety of possibilities, after all.
Holmes has to help his former drug dealer rescue the man's kidnapped daughter. The issues between them are all about Holmes sobriety and whether or not he is as god of a detective sober as he was high. Of course, this is something very near and dear to Watson who at one point lays it out for the former drug dealer - Holmes and his sobriety are more important to her than the man's daughter getting rescued.
Even though I suspect that Holmes will already know, he is going to be devastated on a certain level when he finds out that Watson has been lying to him about staying on as his sobriety companion at his father's bequest. I think ultimately he will be flattered, but it might take an episode or two. This might even be the kind of thing that they end the season with.
Oh, and I really love the title for this episode.

Episode 16: Details
So much for my grand predictions immediately above. Holmes had already found out about Watson lying to him and staying on claiming to be working for his dad. The scene that was their 'confrontattion' was short and not much of a confrontation, more like a small work-around that would allow the show to go on ad infinitum without needing to ever talk about this again.
This time out we got to take a look at the main police detective that Holmes and Watson work with. He turns out to be just as much of a straight shooter as he seems to be, but they find out about his ex-con brother. The story is as much about those two patching up their relationship as it is about a murder which takes place.

Elementary Season 1 Disc 3

Episode 9: You Do It To Yourself
I've already mentioned this, but it bears repeating, I really appreciate the fact that Holmes gets stuff wrong and cops to it right away. He is continually developing hypotheses and for the most part lets the data guide him. If the facts, or what he sees as the facts, don't fit, he abandons that line of thinking and moves to an alternate line.
This is the first episode where we see Holmes making choices to support Watson as a friend, much in the way that she supports him. He tries, unsuccessfully, to to say he's doing things for a completely different reason, but it's obvious to both that sometimes he will do things because Watson needs his support.

Episode 10: The Leviathan
This was almost the episode that didn't have a murder in it. It was initially about a diamond heist that required a break-in into the world's most secure vault. I thought this was quite a lovely change, but a half an hour into the show, the bodies started racking up. Oh well, at least it was all about the diamond heist for a while. It was still good, mind you. I was just hoping to see an expansion of the mold of Elementary episodes.
We finally got to meet Watson's mom who turned out not to be nearly as beastly as she was being built up to be. The story was a bit on the stock side as far as these go - mom disapproves of line of work, meets charismatic boyfriend/partner/client who convinces her to speak her mind, mom says all she wants is for her child to be happy. Not that I want Watson's home life to totally suck or something, but it would be nice to see so meting a little less formulaic and a little more in line with her character.

Episode 11: Dirty Laundry
We're back to the usual solve the murder while discovering the twists along the way. I quite like it. I'm not sure how many people write each episode, but it must be several along with some fact checkers. I understand that as a writer you can tell stories about people who are smarter than yourself by controlling the scene. You give them a limited number of options while appearing to give them complete free will. If you give your detective the option of choosing the obvious suspect who of course is innocent or choosing the person once removed who won't make sense until later, the detective will never choose to pursue neither and instead go out for tacos. I know this to be true beyond a shadow of a doubt because the writer would not create the scene where they go out for tacos. You've still got to be smart to pull this kind of thing off, but you don't have to actually be as smart as Sherlock Holmes to write for him.
There was a nice little twist on how things normally work out when people in the suburbs turn out to be spies - it's the man who was concerned about the child he loved and not the woman - she was a spy until the end.  Sure the bit about the girl pushing her mom and thinking that she killed her only to have it revealed that she didn't was a bit formulaic, but it was quite well acted. I actually was surprised at the quality of performance that both the teen-aged girl and the spy-father turned in, as it was well above what you normally see in a procedural.

Episode 12: M.
We finally get to him. You can't watch a series about Sherlock Holmes without wondering when Moriarty will turn up. The episode isn't actually named for Moriarty but for an assassin that he uses to kill seemingly random people. Holmes himself doesn't even know of Moriarty's existence until very near the end of the episode. Elementary has now provided itself with a nice background story that it can pull out at any time.
The other big deal this time out, maybe even the bigger deal, is that Watson is at her end of service as Holmes sober-companion. She's planning on moving out, and has her next job lined up. Homes wants Watson to stay on as much as she does, perhaps even a little more than she does. The fact that Watson lies to Holmes and tells him that his father is going to pay her for an extension as Holmes counselor is a lie that will come back to haunt her when she least thinks it will.

Elementary Season 1 Disc 2

Episode 5: Lesser Evils
For the first time we got to see Watson in her element. And to no one's surprise, it looks as if she were as good a doctor as Holmes is a detective, which of course is why the pairing works so well. We also found out that she had only been suspended from the hospital, not let go, and she couldn't practice medicine because she had let her license lapse, not because she had lost it. Could this be setting up for a future season closer where it is made to look as if she is going back to medicine and leaving the company of Holmes?
I don't set out watching these shows looking to predict the ending before it is readily obvious. That is not where the pleasure I derive from them comes into play. But, as I am a student of the medium and this genre, I do notice things not readily obvious to others. For example, in this episode we saw two rules of thumb at play that would seem to contradict each other, but in the end didn't, but of course I knew that right from the beginning because of ta third rule of thumb. Rule #1 - in shows that are less than 45 minutes long, if you see a background more than once, especially if the main has reason to talk to them about anything, related to the crime or not, they are almost always the guilty party. Rule #2 - the first blush suspect that is too perfect but has an ironcald alibi, is almost always the culprit. Now in this episode, these point to contradictory ends, but this is where the third rule of theumb comes in. Rule #3 - if there is more than one crime, counting multiple instances of the same crime as separate crimes for purposes of this rule, it is possible for contradictory rules to apply (this is just deduction), and you know it's correct if the two potential culprits either never meet on screen or have a seemingly meaningless encounter early on before either are established as culprits, the former being more likely and pointing to the at least one of the parties not knowing about the other and the second pointing to some type of collusion. It was the former in this case.

Episode 6: Flight Risk
I can only imagine how hard it would be to deal with someone like Holmes the way Watson does. Just when you think you're making some headway with the guy, he pulls a joke on you to prove that he is right, his point being that you should trust him even though he hasn't given you any reason to. In this case, he hired someone to impersonate his father whom Watson had gone to have dinner with. This ends up leading to what you would normally think of as the background story, i.e. the interpersonal relationship between Holmes and Watson, being the main story and the crime investigation the secondary story.
With this episode, we see a mini trend forming of murders that appear as accident or natural cause, but are only shown to be murders through an observation that Holmes makes while other (police) detectives are missing the clues. They are handling it well, better than a lot of other shouws would I think, for two reasons: he's hypothesizing and makes it very clear that he needs to gather more evidence before he is sure and also once he convinces one of more of the officials they are on board and work to solve the crime not to have a pissing contest with him. I can think of several episodes of CSI where this was the set up and they all had the person being so cocky about how right they were without any visible evidence that it made their work environment very hostile for the episode. Not that those were bad episodes, they were just more about melodrama and less about crime solving and character development.

Episode 7: One Way to Get Off
Every procedural seems to at some point in their run introduce the serial killer put away by one of the key figures before the show began. And in each one of these stories, there are some new killings that make it seem like the serial killer might have been innocent. And inevitably it turns out that they weren't, though sometimes it's not resolved in the same episode. You can now add Elementary to that list of shows., and they only waited until their seventh episode. Sometimes the shows, if they run long enough, will revisit that serial killer with either the same set up or something completely new that seems to exonerate them. It always works out that they were even more heinous than previously thought. I guess we will have to wait and see if Elementary will follow that route too.
We had some nice character building going on with the police captain this episode, and if we needed reminding that Aidin Quinn is a great actor, we got it. But, of course we didn't need it, still it was nice to see an episode more focused around his character.

Episode 8: The Long Fuse
The plot for this episode was rather unique as far as procedurals go. Several crimes were uncovered, but the murder that starts the ball rolling was time delayed by four years and not intended for the victims, but for someone who used to have the same office when a different company rented the building. This was accomplished by old tech getting accidentally upgraded by a new cell tower being pout in, and then someone dialing the wrong number which sets off the bomb. There were lots of twists and turns that involved Holmes testing theories that eventually lead him and Watson in the right direction. This was a nice spin on the bombing plot line.
We got to meet a new character this time out who while playing a quite minor role, I think will end up being a semi-regular. He is a potential sponsor for the drug support group that Holmes has to attend. There are lots of possibilities with a character in that role, and with this character in particular as they picked someone who on the surface seems about as different from Holmes as someone could be. Time will tell.

Elementary Season 1 Disc 1

Episode 1: Pilot
Lucy Liu! That guy that used to be married to Angelina Jolie! Okay, I know that his name is Johnny Lee Miller, but he's not really on a name basis the same way that Ms. Liu is.
I think I kind of like the modern take on Sherlock Holmes (both here and Sherlock) portray Sherlock as egotistical and barely able to function in society, and in fact without Watson might not be able to function at all. Watson has also become much more of a partner and less of a sidekick. Actually, the Robert Downey Jr. / Jude Law movies are close to this model too, with it being more true for Holmes than Watson. The other main difference with the Downey / Law interpretations (other than the time it is set in, obviously) is that it is much more camp and action-oriented.
In an episode full of things I liked, it was like icing on the cake that they closed the show with an Elvis Costello song - Watching the Detectives.

Episode 2: While You Were Sleeping
I love that when Sherlock is wrong that he can't admit it, likely due to his ego, and even more so that he attempts to turn it on whomever he is with. Like when they are at hospital and examining a woman in a coma which Sherlock believes to be fake, but upon discovering that he is wrong, he announces to her physician who has just come into the room that the "coma is real" as if the doctor hadn't been able to tell.
I compared Miller's Sherlock to Cumberbatch's Sherlock earlier, and while they are similar when using broad brush strokes, they are of course different when looking at them up close. Miller plays the character as much more circumpensiial, blowing more steam about not caring what other's have to say only to then act upon it. Also thus far he is not as separate from the goings on of the world, though does of course talk about not needing to know extraneous things because they will push out important things from his brain which he believes to have a finite capacity for facts.
Also, I thought the contrivance the killer used to provide herself with a seemingly air-clad alibi was rather ingenious. It's nice to see a procedural that is trying to out-do previous shows without going the Bones route of just making everything look 'grosser'.

Episode 3: Child Predator
This is he first of probably several episodes where Sherlock gets a key fact wrong because the criminal is smarter than your average bear. Not that they are smarter than Sherlock, but one of his flaws is assuming that everyone else is stupid until they show him otherwise, instead of the other way around, which means he is constantly either underestimating people or is completely right. Watson is a good example of the first kind of person.
When I typed in the title of this episode - I typed them all in for the season before beginning to watch the first episode, I thought to myself that this one was likely about a kid being abducted and it turning out that the kid was likely the predator being referred to. Doing a little bit of deductive reasoning on my own there - I am nothing if not a student of television. Not that I can do that with all or even most of the names of episodes, but certain kinds of shows, in this case a police procedural, uses a certain scheme for naming which means the name generally fit one of four categories: the pun, the a-ha, the deceptive (like this one), and the self-referential. I submit the names of all CSI episodes (from all the franchises), NCIS episodes (both franchises), Law & Order episodes (all franchises), Criminal Minds, Bones, Castle and probably some that I've forgotten. I've seen every episode of these shows up through their current DVD releases (not counting Law & Order of which I missed the first few years of and the last couple of years of L&O: SVU and L&O Criminal Intent). Some shows may favor one particular kind over an other, but they all use these four kinds of names.

Episode 4: Rat Race
I have to say that the quality of killer in this series is so far a bit higher than most procedurals, which shouldn't surprise me, because what kind of criminal are you going to throw at Sherlock Holmes? You want them to confound him, and I see there being two types, possibly three that can do that. The first and most obvious and the kind used thus far, are intelligent individuals that are adept enough at covering up their tracks that a normal police detective would be unable to catch them, and thus the need for Holmes. The second type is the 'force of nature' criminal and is someone that is outside of the culture so far that they don't operate withing the system of right and wrong and don't care about getting caught because they aren't aware that they're doing anything that would warrant them getting caught or that there is anyone who could catch them. The third possible type pops up every once in a while in the other procedurals, most often in Criminal Minds, and that is a partnership of two or more individuals acting toward the same goal. This can really muddy things up because the killer can seem to be doing contradictory things.
I am very happy with this show so far, particularly in that everyone is smart, not just Holmes. Given time Watson may prove his equal as a detective, and the police captain who calls Holmes in is also showing himself to be a very astute thinker. Television needs more smart shows.

Shanghai Noon (2000)

I figured that after a string of bad comedies, I would go for an action/comedy film that I knew was funnyish and had a happy ending, this latter more for compensating for the last film than the comedies. You can't go wrong with Jackie Chan when it comes to fast-paced martial arts action with some jokes thrown in. This is at least my second time watching this film, maybe my third. Somehow, I've never seen the sequel, so now I will have to go looking for that.
I like Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson together. Wilson's kind of humor and the character's penchant for avoiding actual physical combat make for a nice counterpost to Chan's kung-fu action. Actually, I tend to like Wilson's work with the exception of Midnight in Paris, where I just thought the whole script was bad and all the actors were flat and close to yelling their lines at each other for significant portions of the film. Maybe I just don't understand Woody Allen because I'm not intellectually endowed enough to understand the fine nuances of his work. What I do know is that every time Wilson teams up for a flick with Vince Vaughn, it makes long to see Wilson in another Allen flick. Not that I want to see Wilson typecast, but I like him best in comedies and Wes Anderson films. I realize that these two subsets of the movie world are not mutually exclusive, but I'm not exactly sure how to classify the Anderson films. Parts of them are hilarious and parts are damned depressing and parts are just different, but the total is always a good film.
The real treat in this movie are the women. I was just listening to a news item earlier today about how women are under-represented in film, the magic number being 17% in regards to starring roles and 28% in regards to speaking roles. That doesn't even take into account all of the women that are there as sexual objects only. There certainly are a lot of women running around in skimpy outfits, and far fewer women than men have speaking parts in this fiilm. At least the two female leads (who are in significantly less of the movie than the two male leads) are not simply there as window dressing. Lucy Liu plays Princess Pei Pei, who is strong-willed and after discovering the plight of the Chinese in America stands up to fight for them and protect them. We also have Brandon Merrill as the "Indian Wife" (I kid you not, that is what the credits call her), who literally saves the main male leads bacon every time they are just about to killed. Both women are capable of taking care of business and doing it with grace. Actually, in the mandatory-for-westerns bar brawl, one of the "ladies of the house" is easily the best fighter in the room, with the exception of Chan.
WAtching this has made me nostalgic for other Jackie Chan movies - I think I will have to track down the series he did with Chris Tucker. I'm not sure they made only three of those or if they made a fourth one, but I've only seen two of them, and the second one, I missed a chunk in the middle of it as something came up when I was trying to watch it. I haven't seen a new Jackie Chan movie in a while, but I'm sure that he must still be making them, so nothing is stopping except lack of slots in my holds queue at the library.

Shanghai Noon at IMDb

The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

I don't know how I let myself get talked into watching these kinds of films. It's probably something like, "Self you should watch it. It'll be kung-fu-tastic. It'll be like all those movies you loved as a kid, except bigger and better and more, more, more. Come on Self, you know you want to." Damned if I don't submit to peer pressure every time. Double damned if I don't get especially suckered by the Tarentino films. And I'm thrice damned by that temptress Lucy Liu. I'll watch her in anything, even if I know it's going to be crap.
Watching these films, by which I mean this genre of the super-exaggerated kung fu movies is almost a guilty pleasure. In fact I would say that it is a guilty pleasure, but as I started that sentence I decided to go with an almost tossed in because for some reason while I feel silly admitting to watching these films, I'll gladly openly discuss The Avengers, or X-Men: First Class. Really, what's the difference? Super hero flicks with predictable plots mitigated by intense fight scenes and big special effects budgets. Which am I talking about here? The Hong Kong style super hero movie or the American style? Exactly.
What I should not admit to (speaking of guilty pleasures) is that as soon as the villain Bronze Body came on the screen, I was all like, "Oh snap! That's Bautista!" Though, in my mind's dialogue I always misspell his name - leaving out the "u". If you don't know who I"m talking about, just skip to the next paragraph, no need to see me admit to watching professional wrestling. Okay, there. I said it. Actually I'm a recovered addict, since I don't have a television. Well, that's not entirely true, there is one in the other room, but I never watch anything on it as it is not connected to anything that allows me to watch anything, i.e. cable or disk player. But really, pro wrestling is like the bastard child of comic books and soap operas. You get hooked into story lines that are no more or less ridiculous than any soap opera, being acted out by people who are no more or less ridiculous looking than any comic book characters (or from what I've seen of certain programs, I might as easily have said "reality shows").
The surprise for me in this film was the character of Jack Knife. For the first couple of minutes he was on screen, I was asking myself where they found an actor who was an older, fatter version of Russell Crowe. And then I saw Lucy Liu and had the epiphany that I was most likely actually looking at the real Russell Crowe. Ouch. I probably would have figured it out sooner if I recognized RZA on sight and not just by name. Hey, I recognized Ms. Liu and that's all that matters, pro wrestlers aside.

The Man with the Iron Firsts at IMDb

Elementary: While You Were Sleeping

Well, the second episode didn't suck. In fact, I think it was quite good. I'm finding that I quite like the Miller portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. He has a hard time making friends, but not like Cumberbatch or Downey. He's not oblivious to other individuals, he just doesn't know how to play with others.
Liu's Watson is not like any other Watson, partly the way she is playing her, but also the relationship - Watson if Holmes' caretaker in point of law if not in point of fact. They are not friends yet, and I'm not sure that the two characters even like each other at this point. You can see the basis for a friendship, though. In the end, it will be much like the other portrayals of their friendship in that Watson likes Holmes in spite of himself.
Speaking of friends, Holmes and the police captain are friends or at least friendly. So far the adversarial relationship that Holmes has with the police he works with is between himself and the various detectives.
The feeling of watching a procedural was even more in evidence this time around, since there was no need to spend time introducing the characters. There is a bit of time spent examining forensic evidence in both eps so far, as noticing little items is kind of Sherlock Holmes' thing, so this show is like a super-hybrid of CSI, Law & Order and Castle. So far, taking the best of each of those shows. I think it helps having film actors - Liu and Miller bring a certain amount of gravitas to the small screen, which is kind of funny since I wouldn't have listed either one of them as great actors, but compared to what we are used to seeing on American television, they are pretty darn good. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they are bad actors, just good actors.

Elementary: Pilot Episode

Jonny Lee Miller is not Benedict Cumberbatch. Get over it. Lucy Liu is not Martin Freeman, but that is obvious. The United States is not Great Britain. Have we got this all straight? Good. I'm not being pedantic, I had to convince myself of this, too.
Miller and Liu have good chemistry, that much is obvious from the very first scene that they have together and holds throughout the whole show. Even more surprising was the quality of the show. I am a fan of Ms. Liu and knew what to expect from her and was pleasantly surprised that she did even better. But, Miller was pretty much an unknown to me. I saw him in that movie, Hackers, what, like twenty years ago? Mostly I remember something about him being an item with, maybe even married to, Angelina Jolie. To say I was pleasantly surprised is almost an understatement. I really liked the way he played Holmes. He wasn't as manic as Cumberbatch's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes or as cocky as Downey's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. He's confident for sure but also aware of his need even dependance on Watson.
What makes this show different from it's British counterpart is the similarity to police procedurals that we are already used to. And by we, I mean me. At the end of the episode I felt this show had more akin with Castle than it did with Sherlock. It's more than just the change of location and working amicably with the police (at least at this point in the series), it's the pacing. At times I could almost believe that I was watching CSI: Sherlock.
I don't know enough of the Sherlock Holmes canon to know if this story was based on any of those by Doyle. That is one aspect of the Sherlock series that I like - that they make an effort to tell a version of original tales. Well, its not like I only like one aspect of Sherlock, I quite like the whole show. And with only one episode to base it on so far, I quite like Elementary as well.