Hacker Cinema
Elementary
2012 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Robert Doherty
A modern-day drama about a crime-solving duo that cracks the NYPD's most impossible cases. Following his fall from grace in London and a stint in rehab, eccentric Sherlock escapes to Manhattan where his wealthy father forces him to live with his worst nightmare - a sober companion, Dr. Watson.
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28 comments on Hacker News
There is an episode in Elementary that involves the Horseshoe, its extraction and conservation. It is just a regular episode, but the visual presentation of the extraction was fascinating. I hope they are real. :)
Although, didn’t it appear in a popular culture reference? I seem to remember an episode of “elementary“ that mentioned it.
This was part of the plot of an Elementary (modern-day Sherlock Holmes in NYC with Jonny Lee Miller & Lucy Liu) episode called Sand Trap.
https://cbselementary.fandom.com/wiki/Sand_Trap#Plot
The American series (House and Elementary) has the advantage of more seasons and episodes, which I think is sometimes required to showcase the challenges of drug addiction and mental health. The fact that these characters having to come back to face the same problem over and over again episode after episode is more true to the nature of the mental health problem itself.
BBC Sherlock has too little episodes to bring audience along a prolonged struggle with mental health.
There's an episode on the TV show Elementary, where an Uber type company employee was using a tracking device to see where riders were going so as to blackmail them if any stops seemed sketchy. Do police officers ever let their lives get out of control and get into financial straights?
We think of public surveillance as a sort of crime prevention, and in a certain ways it is. However, the possible abuse of it is mind boggling.
If that Elementary episode is anything to go by, you join a government agency and your work becomes classified.
The illegal sand trade was also a plot point in a 2018 episode of CBS’ Elementary.
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7751636/
- https://cbselementary.fandom.com/wiki/Sand_Trap (best viewed with uBlock)
We've just had a thing with Sherlock Holmes.
2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.
So that would tend to disprove the thesis. Plus it suggests that having the author on board is valueless. Would you want to pay the author a fee and get them on board, or do you want them bad mouthing your new film?
Further, any author that writes a book with any legitimate expectation that it's going to be made in to a film is probably successful enough already.
JK Rowling probably wasn't expecting a film deal. She wrote the books without that expectation. I'm interested in a copyright that encourages and allows her to write books, not make her into a multimillionaire. If anything her success means she can write less books. Is that a good thing? I'm not in favour of keeping her in penury, but copyright should be about allowing them to work, not make it so they can stop.
Everyone knows Angelina Jolie, but did you know Jonny Lee Miller (Zero Cool) has had a prodigious acting career after Hackers?
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/
My favorite character of his was Sherlock Holmes in "Elementary"
Isn't this like the plot of an episode of the show Elementary?
From what I remember, "Elementary" follows the opposite formula from Colombo. The protagonists almost always spend the first half of an episode pursing a red herring.
Black-market maple syrup made it into an episode of Elementary (5x13, "Over a Barrel" - while investigating a murder they find a street gang had switched from smuggling cocaine to smuggling syrup because it was more profitable)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_(TV_series)
Way down in the article, it describes some data that was not included in its analysis but nevertheless is quite interesting, where several people in a restaurant were infected by one other patron.
This is something straight out of a TV crime show:
> As the authors note, the restaurant in question was air-conditioned on the date in question. Using video footage, they were able to chart the position of every diner in the restaurant, and then map their subsequent infection status in relation to both the single infected individual known to be present at the time and the air conditioning system’s outgoing and intake streams. If the primary transmission mode of COVID-19 were by small, sub-Flüggian airborne particles, the presence of the forced air convection might have made the environment safer (especially since “smear samples from the air conditioner [itself] were all [COVID-19] nucleotide negative”). But the researchers instead found evidence for the opposite: “The key factor for infection was the direction of the airflow,” with downstream individuals being most at risk—a result consistent with the thesis that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the ballistic transmission of large respiratory droplets.
I could easily imagine that having been a key insight in an episode of "Bones" or "Elementary".
(If you are looking for something good to binge watch during COVID "stay at home", I recommend "Elementary", currently on Hulu and CBS All Access. It's a Sherlock Holmes set in modern times series. They did a really good job of taking many characters and plots from the original stories and adapting them in such a way that if you read the stories you will recognize them and perhaps even think you know what is going to happen--but they have changed just enough that the ending will still surprise you but also be eminently reasonable in hindsight. The stories that aren't obviously based on any particular original are equally good).
Not your main point at all, but Hulu has Elementary episodes if you can get access to Hulu.
This brings to mind an annoyance about Netflix.
If you search for something they don't have, they won't admit that. They give you search results as if you asked for random crap in what their AI thinks is an appropriate genre (in reality, they just span you with what they want you to watch, e.g. paid promotions and Netflix properties).
I was looking for "Elementary" episodes. I got a cluttered page back full of crap without a single Elementary episode or a simple statement to the effect that "We don't carry Elementary episodes".
I'd never pay for Netflix. I get it free from T-Mobile.
I find them better than TV, pound for pound. For example, _Backstrom_ is a shitty House clone in many senses, but is a much better detective show than _Elementary_.
They have more feedback data and often great "production values" (i.e. they spent the extra money to make it nice). It doesn't always pay off (how stupid was _Marseille_, with Gerard Depardieu at his best acting chops in years and a political story that melts into family drama in three episodes flat?).
But having 100 Netflix shows and a random assortment of failed indie movies is not better than having 10 Netflix shows and a decent film catalog. Netflix pretty much snuck up on the less attentive of us by giving us more shows (hey, I basically stayed for Bojack Horseman) and taking away feature-length studio-produced movies.
I mean, who has the time to watch a full-length movie most days.
So I kind of feel cheated, but not enough to leave yet.
The wicked witch trope is named after the wicked witch of the west character, which don't do much leering or hand rubbing. There is a lot of cackling, possible some eye-rolling, but that's about it. An other famous witch villain is the white witch (Narnia), which has none of those attributes.
But lets look at a famous villain that has been portrait as both female and male roles and see how they differ. Moriarty is male in the TV show Sherlock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN7DYPJLXkc), and female in Elementary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7i8cQontg). Which character is show more as the typical villain, and which is portrait as more complex with redeeming values? If they keep the script identical with the exact same lines, what would happened if the genders was reversed for the two shows?
There was an episode of the american version of the "modern Sherlock Holmes" TV series, "Elementary", where the plot revolved around a company akin to Uber (called Zooss in the show). It was particularly illustrative of how tempting it can be for internal employees to abuse that type of data. Among other things Sherlock was able to requisition a large fraction of the company GPS tracking data for his murder investigation. As a side effect he was able to figure out who was having an affair, who was going for an interview at a competitor's company, etc.
5 minutes after drop-off is quite enough to uncover where you meant to _really_ go if you gave a close-by address, in these scenarios.
That's pretty much what the OP meant with "So your secret rendezvous may not be so secret" but it's particularly poignant in a TV show.
TV tried this - remember Bones one season how every episode she'd demonstrate to Booth how her iPhone worked? Or on Elementary how Sherlock would flip open his Surface in the john and send an email, while the camera lovingly watched over his shoulder?
Viewers rebel, ratings drop, and directors quickly ban such perversions of their art. Its not sustainable. Will you read articles on HN that are half ads? Neither will I.
I've only watched 3 episodes of that so far but it does seem like a conscious decision to me - the main character is a vigilante, there's a lot of crime and corruption going on, so there are good story reasons for characters to isolate themselves. But it could be part budgetary - extras must get pretty expensive when you're signed up with all of the guilds and so on. whereas an indie producer on a tiny budget can get away with inviting people to be in a movie for novelty, free food, and a DVD, established producers have to pay all those warm bodies. On Elementary for example (also set in New York, and with loose structural similarities - investigating crime every episode, regular obligatory scenes in police stations and courthouses etc. - they easily use 30+ extras per episode. There's almost always an interview scene involving a suspect and lawyer that takes place in a windowed office with as many as 10 background actors in police uniforms etc.
As a European I think this has deepcultural roots, probably in religion. I'm struck by the way many elecators don't go to the 13th floor, or the 13th in a series of numbered streets is often called something else (eg in SF you have 12th Avenue, Funston Avenue, 14th Avenue...). People prefer to say someone 'passed' (presumably to the afterlife) rather than that they 'died'. And of course there's no swearing on TV - although this only applies to American swear words, it's OK to use words that are considered quite rude in English or Australia.
I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.
AI seems more feasible than interstellar travel. I think the singularity or whatever is far further off than people guess because the stuff we don't know is a lot harder than we can know, but interstellar travel either requires massive breakthroughs in physics or engineering on a level we have yet to seriously contemplate.
the proponents of any given tier of AI approaches always claims that consciousness will arise out of just doing more of what they're doing now. I doubt it.
Of course, an AI that wipes us out before figuring out how to repair itself would be kind of dumb.
BTW a recent episode of Elementary was based on this topic and was, by the standards of network TV, stunningly accurate on all the issues.
The problem is the same as it is with print; the subscription fee usually only covers the cost of distribution. The cost of content is typically paid for by advertising, which brings in more than subscriptions do. This CBS streaming service is going to be $6/month. So for each million subscribers they get $6m/mo.
But CBS's most show, The Big Bang Theory, which is the most popular show in the USA in that time slot, pulls in about $6.5 million of ad revenue every episode. So CBS would need 4 million subscribers just to match the revenue stream from that one show. Put another way, they need 50k subscribers to replace the ad revenue from one single 30-second commercial spot on that same show. http://www.ibtimes.com/economics-prime-time-how-much-does-it-cost-place-30-second-ad-prime-time-weeknight-tv-show-1424544
This is why the economics of TV are so brutal and many shows are canceled after only a few episodes or a single season. It's not necessarily the fault of the show itself - if a new show goes up against a much stronger offering from another channel, it may not attract a critical mass of viewers and it's more economical to cancel further production and fill the time slot with repeats of more popular material that draws a reliable audience.
Now it could be possible for individual shows to break even. I don't watch a lot of TV, so I only ever watch one program on CBS, a show called Elementary. I would be willing to consider paying something like $1/episode or $25 for the whole season up front - but that has run for a few years already. For launching a new show with the production value and baseline quality of acting that a commercial audience expects, you probably can't get people to pay for it without spending the same amount of money on marketing as on the production itself. So without the cross-subsidies from advertising it would be quite difficult to raise the capital to finance new TV shows. Obviously you have alternatives depending on what sort of show you want to make, eg you can produce a wacky animated comedy relatively cheaply and launch it on YouTube or somesuch to get your initial audience critical mass. But if you want to do an hour-long serious drama or current affairs or science programming, your up front costs are far higher and you need people to open their checkbooks - your MVP probably costs at least $1 million.
My crazy theory was similar. Swap early (perhaps on the ground so that MH370 might even never have left), other plane flies out, turns off code, and returns. The other plane is smaller and so can land on more runways than a 777, and even if seen would not arouse suspicious since no one is looking for it. Perhaps a transponder is even then used with a drone to make it look like MH370 flies out west over the ocean and disappears. Drone crashes in the ocean, but is small enough that even if debris is spotted, it won't be connected with MH370.
I bet the writers of "Elementary" could make a good episode out of this.
There is a US TV show called "Elementary" which uses the characters Sherlock Holmes and Watson, set in NYC in the present day.
See for example, the Star Trek TNG episode that used Sherlock Holmes. At the time, the studio assumed Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, but were contacted by the estate and told they would have to license the character if they wanted to use him again. This almost prevented a follow up episode, and probably did prevent other follow ups to what was considered a good story line.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Elementary,_Dear_Data
The TV show Elementary did an episode in which someone solved N = NP and then used the solution to break any encryption they wanted. It all seemed a little far fetched to me.
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.