The new season of BBC's Sherlock caused a stir when it seemed to directly engage with its fans. The show, and its showrunners Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, have been criticised for the enormous amount of influence that fans of the show seemed to have on the narrative of the show, and the negative effects that influence brings.
The prime concern appears to be that letting the audience dictate the narrative, or trying too hard to appeal to an audience's whims, risks turning a tv show into little more than self-congratulatory reruns that bleed dry the novelty and creativity of the show.
But things really can't be treated that simplistically, especially when you consider that Sherlock brings the great detective into the modern world. If we are to bring Sherlock Holmes to the world we inhabit now, to the London of today, you must talk about the shape of that world. You must talk about the things that set that world apart from the Victorian era of Conan Doyle. You must talk about how someone with so specific a skillset manages to function within the social structures of our world. When you talk about those things, you cannot ignore just how thin the fourth wall has become.
Critics have warned that the influence of fans could end up making the show far too narrow in their appeal (Lawson, 2014). Instead of being available and accessible to a wide audience, they risk instead become a niche interest for a few obsessives.
There are reasons, however, to not be quite so pessimistic.
After the success of the first two seasons, the gap between the second and third seasons inevitably generated immense amounts of anticipation amongst the show's large, and largely online, fanbase (Mellor, 2014). This created a fascinating problem: how do you diffuse the tension created by fan expectation?
The answer that Sherlock gave us served two purposes. First, it toyed and played with the fans and their theories, diffusing the tension with comedy while coming a hairs breadth from breaking the fourth wall in the process. But secondly, it served also to dissect an increasingly important part of the twenty-first century: the fourth wall is now very thin.
The world we live in is no longer neatly packaged into discrete boxes. Even before a piece of art is completed it can be discovered, dissected, critiqued, praised, condemned and forgotten.
The creators of Sherlock have tried hard to show us that high scrutiny environment, with those aspects of our world playing an important part in the narrative of the first two seasons. In particular in the episode The Reichenbach Fall where Jim Moriarty's final plot involved turning the churning and vindictive whirlwind's of media critique and public opinion against the detective.
Moffat and Gatiss' Sherlock tries to give us a real sense of the world we inhabit. It presents us with a dense and critical world of limited privacy. Through pioneering visual representations of technology such as text messages, Sherlock is able to maintain a high pace to the episodes that suits its setting. And through repeated references to blogs, forums and message boards, and social media like Twitter and YouTube, we see another aspect of our world: obsession.
In the first two seasons we saw the eponymous Sherlock through the lens of the cases he tried to solve with Dr John Watson. The third season has now taken a step back in order to show us more. The early seasons demonstrated the skill of the man in his own field, inside his own obsession. Now it is endeavouring to show us how he lives in the wider world.
Sherlock, a man with skills that make him a machine for detection, finely tuned by obsession, finds himself vulnerable in other kinds of
situations by the
specificity of skill-set. The third season's second episode, The Sign of Three, reinforces that direction by placing the detective at a wedding. Sherlock's absolute focus on his detective work leaves him isolated from other people and the rituals through which their lives proceed. That isolation leaves him bemused and uncomfortable when thrust into participation.
Even as critics warn against the increasing ability of fandoms to encroach upon the separation offered by the fourth wall, Sherlock delivers up moral tales about the dangers of isolation and obsession. It takes that obsession and shows us the counter productive threat it poses in a world without barriers. It shows us the dangers of obsessive observation when the observers fail to weigh things in proper time or context, or twist those tools to reshape the world in selfish ways.
Sherlock has responded to pressure from the other side of the fourth wall by offering fans a little bit of what they want, while presenting them with a cautionary tale. If you demand that the world reshapes itself to accommodate your obsessions, you might just get what you want. But reshaping the world around what you want can leave you boxed in and isolated from other experiences.
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References:
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+ Stephen Moffat & Mark Gatiss' Sherlock Series 1 and 2; BBC, 2012 [Buy Now]
+ Stephen Moffat & Mark Gatiss' Sherlock Series 3; 'Episode 1: The Empty Hearse'; BBC, 2014.
+ Stephen Moffat & Mark Gatiss' Sherlock Series 3; 'Episode 2: The Sign of Three'; BBC, 2014.
+ Mark Lawson's 'Sherlock and Doctor Who: beware of fans influencing the TV they love'; in The Guardian; 3 January 2014.
+ Louis Mellor's 'Sherlock series 3 episode 1 review: The Empty Hearse'; on Den of Geek; 1 January 2014.
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