Elementary: The Third Season

While CBS's Sherlock Holmes update series doesn't enjoy the huge cult following of the clever British show Sherlock, it does offer an equally interesting and intelligent take on the classic Holmes canon. Set in contemporary New York City, Elementary makes Holmes (played by Jonny Lee Miller) a recovering heroin addict, and (Joan, not John) Watson (Lucy Liu) a former surgeon and addiction counselor who serves as Holmes' protégé. Season two ended with Holmes leaving New York to work with British Intelligence—abandoning Watson with hardly a word—while the third season opens with Watson running her own successful detective practice and engaged in a serious romantic relationship when Sherlock abruptly returns with a new charge: Kitty (Ophelia Lovibond), a young woman with her own demons. The separation of Holmes and Watson is temporary, however, and the familiar team is back together by the season's halfway point. Elementary follows a more conventional procedural format than the BBC's Sherlock, and Miller's Holmes is more subdued and internalized than Benedict Cumberbatch's sleuth, but he's also more believably human, sporting eccentricities that are bound up with his past. Along the way, the show gives Holmes room to evolve as he comes to value his friendships with Watson, NYPD Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn), and Detective Bell (Jon Michael Hill). Compiling all 24 episodes from the 2014-15 third season, extras include an episode commentary and behind-the-scenes featurettes. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)