Common Law was not picked up for a second season. All that Wes/Travis sex will just be in my head now.....

The New Normal is the new black....and the new gay....and the new republican....

Glee didn't really change, only nobody has names now, just "the new Rachel", "the new Puck" and "the new Mercedez" *L*

H50 is gayer than ever.


Below is Caitlin Moran’s piece on Elementary in The Times.

It’s hard, as a Briton, not to feel a little piqued by the arrival of Elementary. As the US Sherlock Holmes reboot — commissioned after the success of Sherlock in the UK — the very existence of Elementary feels a little … rude, to be honest.

Surely, in insisting on their own 21st-century TV Sherlock — rather than just accepting our smashing, pre-existing one — the Americans have breached a whole slew of etiquette guidelines.

Why was our Sherlock not good enough for them? It’s got a dementedly passionate fanbase, Baftas up to its nuts, and international sex-cases Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead roles. I’m sorry, Uncle Sam — did all those fabulous riches in some way offend you? Does that all still seem a bit … modest, and low-key? Do you want fries with your Sherlock? Do you want to Super-Size Holmes? Do you want the greatest detective of our times covered in Ranch Sauce, and served by someone coming into the room backwards, on roller-skates, singing Blueberry Hill? How dare the Americans act as if our Sherlock isn’t good enough for them! HOW DARE THEY!

I can’t help but feel that this is all becoming a borderline diplomatic issue — as sore and vexed as if, after the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, Barack Obama had announced that, actually, the US was going to have its own royal couple, roped in William Shatner and Kate Gosselin, reality TV star of Jon & Kate Plus 8, and sent them on a competing tour of Canada, instead. Imagine. Imagine. There would have been Royal Navy boats steaming towards Washington within the month. So rude. So rude.

So. Heroically putting aside the terrible national insult of its mere existence, how is Elementary? Oh, you know. It’s all right. You know everything you thought it would be? It’s that. Someone who knows what they’re doing (show runner Rob Doherty worked on Medium for six years, Ringer for two) has shipped Conan Doyle’s tetchy, genius hero to 2012, and milked the potential of the great sleuth in a bold new world of DNA fingerprinting, hacking and iPhones.

So this Sherlock is Jonny Lee Miller — a posh, wealthy Londoner who’s just finished rehab and moved to New York. Actually, he didn’t exactly “finish” rehab — he escaped from the clinic on the day he was due to be discharged, “to prove I could”. Because that’s how rebellious he is. He’s half an hour rebellious.

Holmes lives in a grand apartment block — soaring ceilings, huge windows — that’s falling into modish, edgy ruin. Holmes himself echoes that edginess — the first time we see him, he’s standing in the middle of this peeling, inky ruin, naked from the waist up, and covered in tattoos. He’s motionless in front of eight televisions, of varying sizes, all showing different channels. Is this how he’s piecing his life back together, post-rehab? By pretending he works in the Audio Visual Department at John Lewis?

In the event, the answer to this question is “No”. It turns out that Holmes is just proving he can watch eight televisions at once — yet still pick out dialogue from individual shows and quote it back to Dr Watson (Lucy Liu) when she enters the room.

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” he says, spooking her out, and making her drop her handbag on the floor.

Amazingly, once she realises that he’s not saying this about her — but is simply quoting the next line of dialogue from a rerun of a day-time soap on Television No 4 — she doesn’t look seriously impressed, and go, “ZOMG! You can watch eight televisions at the same time? This is awesome. You could become either an in-house vision-mixer on a show such as Antiques Roadshow, or work in the CCTV control room of NCP Car Parks. Yowsa. I burn for you.”

She just continues to stare at him like he’s a bit weird.

Dr Watson has rocked up to Holmes’s TVarium at the behest of Holmes’s father. Holmes’s father, we get the impression, is powerful, clever and stern, and probably made Holmes an addict by saying something cutting about the sextant a seven-year-old Holmes made, from scratch, as a Christmas present (“This calibrates to 72 degrees! You’ve actually made a quintant, you fool!”) Watson is ostensibly here as Holmes’s “addict sitter” — to make sure he doesn’t relapse.

“What do I call you?” Holmes asks.

“Whatever you want,” Watson replies, calmly. “That’s your privilege as a client.”

“Then I shall call you a ‘glorified helper-monkey’,” Holmes says; going on to refer to her as “my personal valet” when they go and check out their first murder.

What Watson’s really here to do, of course, is to wind up fans of Conan Doyle, and Sherlock, on internet messageboards. A female Watson? A lady Watson? Watsdaughter? Mottson? This is against all nature. Against all law. This is classic fiction, for heaven’s sake! You can’t go just … making things up! What if they have sex? Sherlock can’t have sex with Watson! He’s a Holmesosexual! Oh, this is worse than that time they put an ear on a mouse.

Personally, I was simply curious/neutral about the idea of a female Watson and, in the event, the conceit works fine. If the conceit is, of course, to make a detective series about a very clever, socially awkward detective and his more socially adroit sidekick. The scripting and plotting of Elementary scores a non-embarrassing 6/10, and Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock is an interesting take: eyes bright, diction clipped, he keeps bees on the apartment roof, and the honey oozes, portentously, through the floorboards.

“I’m writing a book,” he explains, to Watson, as they stand on the roof, with the Manhattan skyline behind them. “A practical handbook on bee-keeping culture, with regards to segregating the queen.”

Watson stares at him, as the honey drips, like he’s the silliest/cleverest boy alive.

Of course, CBS could have simply commissioned a detective series about a very clever detective, his sidekick and their bees, called it “Basil Thinkington & His Sidekick, Joanna Lovely”, and avoided all of the Elementary v Sherlock controversy entirely. Because, let’s be honest, Elementary has nothing to do with either Sherlock, or Conan Doyle. Whilst Sherlock is by way of a vivid love-letter to Conan Doyle — every episode competes to be the one with the most in-jokes and canonical references; it is an act of deep adoration, reverence and joy — Elementary has taken nothing but the names, and a whole lot of publicity off the back of an imagined rivalry.

But of course, if they’d just made yet another solid detective story about a detectorer and his less detectory mate, I wouldn’t be writing about it, and you wouldn’t be reading about it.

On the other hand, Arrow is a barely disguised rewrite of Smallville, but Oliver Queen is shirtless in every episode and holy christ on a cracker is that guy HOT HOT HOT!!!!!