I'm getting in my decade's allotment of talking about Lucy Liu

[seriousfic]

Can we please never, under pain of torture, NEVER make the argument that Watson can't be a woman because it "goes against the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle"? Because I'm going to give it to you straight-up. They already made a Sherlock Holmes TV show that was perfectly faithful and accurate to the source material. Jeremy Brett was in it.


Yes. This is exactly how they looked. Go home everyone.

And it was awesome. But they pretty much did the whole thing. You know how people say that we don't need another Superman movie because the Christopher Reeve Superman was so good? They're wrong--we never really got a Clark/Lois HEA/relationship, or the Fourth World, or the post-Crisis Luthor, etc etc, pick your poison. There's room to redo it. But Sherlock Holmes--they filmed all the stories with a guy who's perfect for the part. They actually filmed it in Britain, back when everything still looked the same as it did in Sherlock Holmes's time period.

So, this isn't a bug, this is a feature. The only reason to do anything with Sherlock Holmes is to take the near-universal concept and toy with it. You can set it in modern times, play up the bromance--but drawing a line at incorporating a woman into things is pretty much sexist on the face, unless you're going to decry the other Sherlock Holmes cinema for including texting and drag queens.


As intended by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Comments

[iteari.livejournal.com]

I'm honestly looking forward to a female Watson. More, because Lucy Liu.

A little bored though that while they cast an Asian woman for a role that is almost always reserved for old white dude, they didn't bother to have fun and do the same with Sherlock Holmes. Gina Torres, who's with me? Tabrett Bethel? Lucy Lawless? Rachelle Lefevre? She's got fab hair and had me sit through Twilight!

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Or Helen McCrory if you wanted to keep it British. She has a female Jeremy Brett thing going for her, plus she's definitely good-looking enough for prurient Watson/Holmes shippers.

[iteari.livejournal.com]

Now that really fucking works!

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

It's the stupidest complaint in the world. Holmes and Watson have been portrayed as robots. They've been aliens. They've been various sorts of animals (mostly dogs). They've operated in the present and in the future. They've been little kids. Holmes has been portrayed as an Inspector Gadget-esque idiot led to all his successes by Watson or Mycroft even Lestrade. They've been transmogrified into doctors solving medical, as opposed to criminal mysteries (It boggles my mind when House fans don't notice this). They've been portrayed to varying degrees of overtness as gay lovers. Half the stuff people think of as "authentic" to Holmes is wrong anyway.

There have already been a million adaptations of Watson and Holmes, and this is what people get uptight about? Stupid.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

But...but...girls are icky!

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I think the people getting uptight about this probably got uptight about a lot of that stuff too.

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I was rewatching Kill Bill a while ago and thought that Liu hadn't been in anything in a while.

[resa haile (from livejournal.com)]

I am excited to see Lucy Liu as Watson; I even made a Facebook page in support of it. That doesn't mean I would never like to see all sixty stories done. This has been done on radio, but not on television--the Granada series had forty-one episodes, one of which conflated two stories into one and lost one of the most affecting Holmes-Watson moments (from the story "The Three Garridebs"), and at least two others were far afield from the original stories in a less than positive way ("The Eligible Bachelor" and "The Last Vampyre"). I can enjoy all the episodes and Brett and Burke and Hardwick, but I do hope to see the whole Canon done someday. That said, I am looking forward to the new show immensely. Although I think Cumberbatch and Freeman are also great, I questioned why a Sherlock Holmes and Watson in modern London had to be white, had to be men, when the series began, and I find it odd that people are so shocked by the concept.