Post by sgev1977 on Jul 23, 2020 17:48:19 GMT
This is a nice article about the pilot:
More:
www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/inside-unaired-sherlock-pilot-scrapped/
This is not entirely unprecedented – most famously in the case of Game of Thrones, the abortive original episode of which was dubbed “painful” by its writer DB Weiss and has only been seen by a handful of individuals to this day. But the Sherlock pilot, released as part of the DVD-box set at the end of the first series, tells a rather different story.
For starters, it’s really quite good. In essentials, it’s a shorter version of what became the first episode: same actors, similar plot, similar script. Benedict Cumberbatch’s hair is shorter and what became his signature scarf is missing but he’s got the same gravelly tones and thinly-veiled vulnerability; Speedy’s Cafe has been replaced by Mrs Hudson’s Snax N Sarnies but Baker Street is otherwise unchanged; the plot is thinner and cycled through quicker but that’s what you’d expect of a version which is only two-thirds of the ultimate running time.
If the first attempt at A Study in Scarlet had ever seen the light of day, Sherlock would still have been a hit.
So why the panic? What made the BBC penny-pinchers throw nearly a million quid down the drain and tell a crack team of veteran television writers (Gatiss and Moffat had met when they were both working on Doctor Who) to start again from scratch?
For starters, it’s really quite good. In essentials, it’s a shorter version of what became the first episode: same actors, similar plot, similar script. Benedict Cumberbatch’s hair is shorter and what became his signature scarf is missing but he’s got the same gravelly tones and thinly-veiled vulnerability; Speedy’s Cafe has been replaced by Mrs Hudson’s Snax N Sarnies but Baker Street is otherwise unchanged; the plot is thinner and cycled through quicker but that’s what you’d expect of a version which is only two-thirds of the ultimate running time.
If the first attempt at A Study in Scarlet had ever seen the light of day, Sherlock would still have been a hit.
So why the panic? What made the BBC penny-pinchers throw nearly a million quid down the drain and tell a crack team of veteran television writers (Gatiss and Moffat had met when they were both working on Doctor Who) to start again from scratch?
The comic partnership between Cumberbatch and Freeman ensured Sherlock’s less amiable moments didn’t alienate him from the audience. “To me, Watson is quite literally the audience. So when Sherlock is being a dick, he says ‘you’re being a dick’ and the audience goes ‘okay, okay, that’s fine then.’ They allow him to be unlikeable as long as someone’s calling him out on it.”
You can see the impact of this kind of thinking by comparing the first episode to the original pilot. In the pilot, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is just ever-so-slightly sweeter, more boyish, more eager to please. He first appears in a scene at the morgue of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where besotted registrar Molly Hooper (played by Louisa Brealey, who later becomes a major character) asks him if he’d like to have coffee. “Black, two sugars” is the reply.
The lines are the same in both versions but Cumberbatch plays his differently in each: in the pilot, he looks confused and it’s unclear whether he misunderstands her question; but by the first episode, he is totally deadpan, making the moment all the more devastating and all the more funny.
You can see the impact of this kind of thinking by comparing the first episode to the original pilot. In the pilot, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is just ever-so-slightly sweeter, more boyish, more eager to please. He first appears in a scene at the morgue of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where besotted registrar Molly Hooper (played by Louisa Brealey, who later becomes a major character) asks him if he’d like to have coffee. “Black, two sugars” is the reply.
The lines are the same in both versions but Cumberbatch plays his differently in each: in the pilot, he looks confused and it’s unclear whether he misunderstands her question; but by the first episode, he is totally deadpan, making the moment all the more devastating and all the more funny.
More:
www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/inside-unaired-sherlock-pilot-scrapped/