It's Elementary! Helen Mildish - Sukis Blog 5

               I chose to analyze Elementary a crime drama.

I love this show for many reasons. The entertainment value, the intense mystery and detecting storyline, and the back stories of the characters. The three themes I chose to focus on were Sherlock's drug addiction, Watson's family reaction to her career change, and crime solving.

Sherlock is a brilliant man who sought out drugs to enhance his ability to solve crimes, but his drug addiction quickly overcame him and he was placed into rehab to gain control over his life again. We usually associate drug addition with the poor or extremely rich and usually not very intelligent people looking for an escape from reality. His character is a very wealthy man, so that does fit into our predetermined stereotype, but the reason why he chose to use drugs is quite different and he is quite intelligent as well. He "needed" the drugs to stay awake longer to help solve crimes and get criminals off the streets per episode 15. I really enjoyed that they took a small deviation from what was typical for a drug addict character. Decoding is the process of interpreting a message (Martin & Nakayama p. 364) and is also what Sherlock excels at. He sees objects, places, people and decodes or extrapolates information from them to help solve mysteries.

Watson is an accomplished female doctor who loses a patient and is traumatized enough to quit the medical field. She decided to become a sober companion, a person who lives with or checks in on a recovering drug addict continuously to make sure they have the support they need after rehab to succeed in life. Her family and friends are mystified and confused as to why she would walk away from a promising medical career. Watson further baffles her family when she gives up being a Sober Companion to become Sherlock's apprentice and a consulting detective. They see it as a massive fall from grace, and oversimplify her situation by saying "Well, she was a doctor, and now she is hanging out with a drug addict all day". We assume that any drug addict has no worth, and their bad deeds will negatively affect us. In essence, we assume that once you are a drug addict you never really recover. She defies her own cultural identity(being a doctor) by seeing worth in another (being a detective), and boldly pursues it. I would categorize her career as an example of folk culture of sorts. According to the graph on page 362 in Intercultural Communications by Martin and Nakayama, traditional activities that are not financially driven would fall in a folk culture category. Since Watson has chosen a traditional crime fighting occupation and lower pay I think that this applies to her.

Crime dramas are at least half of the shows on TV today it seems. This shows make solving crime seem easy because Sherlock connects points that are far apart from each other with ease. On the other hand, Watson being an apprentice detective kind of breaks down the giant leaps that Sherlock is making into more reasonable sized conclusions the viewer can relate to. They usually solve their crimes in just one or two days, which gives us the incorrect notion that crimes are easy to solve. It also shows that traditional detective work benefits from having consultant who think "outside of the box", implying that detectives are not capable of solving crimes in a timely fashion."People express concern about the social effects of popular culture..." (Martin & Nakayama p. 359) but I think that crime dramas where the criminals are getting caught make people think twice about committing crimes.

I like that this show exist, taking an old story and creating it modern times with some drastic changes from it's original context. It frequently challenges other stereotypes we have created, usually poking fun at them with witty dialogue. I included a video to show you a bit of what I mean.

Works Cited

IMDB, A Giant Gun, Filled with Drugs, Elementary TV - Episode 15, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2191671/episodes?season=1&ref_=tt_eps_sn_1, retrieved 29 March 2013

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.