There were three reasons I did not – DID NOT – want to like Elementary, CBS’s new “Modern Day Sherlock Holmes in New York City” crime drama:
1) Obviously, I was concerned that it was basically ripping off BBC’s Sherlock, and while “modern-day Sherlock Holmes” isn’t exactly fresh ground, this is the only one that stars a man so British that his name is Benedict Cumberbatch, so yes, I was worried CBS would stomp on something that did a great job the first time over.
2) CBS already HAS a “Sherlock-type solving murders” series, it’s called The Mentalist and I enjoy it – so I’m a little protective, when I see the same network trotting out a similar premise with a higher-profile title, and
3) Even though the Sherlock Holmes books were essentially eccentric-lead-in-a-crime-procedural stories when they were originally written, I still felt like literally using the Sherlock character was cheating, in a way, or at least being kind of lazy about introducing a new detective character.
So imagine my shock at quite liking Elementary. (more…)
I am performing Dramaturgery on NBC’s pilot Revolution. In order to make this show interesting to me, I’ve made some kind of small but important changes to the backstory (detailed in this post 
There are two ways to go with a story like Revolution, and I think Moff is right in one sense, in that just how a society breaks down in the sudden absence of electricity could be pretty interesting, and I think the other sense is how a society builds itself up after the apocalypse, and in the absence of electricity. There are a lot of pretty neat questions to be asked: what is the individual’s responsibility to the state? How much security is worth sacrificing for the sake of stability? Should civilization be about building bigger states, or should we be content with small agrarian communities? What exactly IS civilization – the material well-being of its people, art, culture, roads, what is it? What is the value of science – is it inevitably good? Should it be controlled? By whom? What about kings? Democracy? What about religion – how can it benefit a society’s build? How can it be a hindrance? How exactly do all these things come together, and what is the purpose of them?
