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Cookie_Monster's avatar

Me think Sherlock Holmes so endlessly adaptable because, while Doyle's actual stories range from fine to great, *idea* of Sherlock Holmes is all-timer. Which is why various adaptations can take things barely mentioned in books — Moriarty, Mycroft, Irene Adler, cocaine use (which medical doctor Arthur Conan Doyle seem to have confused with opiate, because in stories it put Holmes into stupor) — and flesh them out remarkably well. Not to mention plugging Holmes into Victorian London full of other romanticized figures (Jack the Ripper and Freud among them).

And Holmes formula — of impossible mystery solved by impossibly clever bloke — sturdy enough that your various Laws & Order and CSIs not can ever exhaust it. It like cookie dough — you can add chocolate chips, raisins walnuts, frosting, ice cream, whatever delicious chemical sludge they put in Oreos — it always going to be good because underlying idea just incredibly appealing.

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Craig J. Clark's avatar

This one may fall out of your purview since it’s an hour-long television film -- and it’s about Sherlock Holmes’s grandson, who’s also named Sherlock Holmes -- but 1977’s The Strange Case of the End of Civilization As We Know It lives up to its name. It stars and was co-written by John Cleese while he was between series of Fawlty Towers and is as much about taking the piss out of ’70s detective shows as it was playing around with Holmesiana. (For example, instead of cocaine, Cleese’s Holmes smoke marijuana.) Also, Dr. Watson’s grandson, who’s played by Arthur Lowe, has “bionic bits” for some reason that is never really clear.

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