Post by MagdaFR on Sept 19, 2022 18:59:16 GMT
On Monday 26 September begins Inside Man on BBC One, a new series written by Moffat.
In this interview he talks about it and his previous works, including Sherlock and the criticism he received.
www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/19/insane-rightwing-misogynist-im-none-of-those-things-steven-moffat-on-doctor-who-his-baftas-and-his-critics
About the new series and Sherlock:
Moffat’s excellent new four-part BBC drama, Inside Man, is about what happens when nice people do something they know to be wrong. One of them – an American criminology professor called Jefferson Grieff, played by Stanley Tucci – is on death row after murdering his wife.
“The other thing about murder is that it is really hard. Doing nothing is so much easier.” Moffat cites Hitchcock’s 1966 film Torn Curtain to make his point. It takes a professor (played by Paul Newman) and a farmer’s wife eight minutes and eight seconds to murder a Stasi agent. “I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill a man,” said Hitchcock at the time. The lesson of this for Moffat is clear: solving murder is easy; committing it is harder.
When Moffat was writing Sherlock between 2008 and 2017, he wasn’t concerned about such matters. “Sherlock turns up after the crime has been committed. He comes in time to see the body in the library, and solves the crime by – ahem! – guessing accurately. But actually the real drama is before he arrives. I can see why that’s a good formula.”
When Moffat was writing Sherlock between 2008 and 2017, he wasn’t concerned about such matters. “Sherlock turns up after the crime has been committed. He comes in time to see the body in the library, and solves the crime by – ahem! – guessing accurately. But actually the real drama is before he arrives. I can see why that’s a good formula.”
Does he think Sherlock was formulaic? “We don’t think of shows like Sherlock as dramas,” says Moffat. “We think of them as entertainment, as puzzle boxes. Nothing wrong with that, or at least I don’t think so. But a lot of people do. They see what I do as merely clever.” That clearly rankles, as did the reviews he got when the backlash began against Sherlock’s scripted cleverness. “My favourite review was one of Sherlock that went: ‘As ever, regrettably, it falls back on cleverness.’ Falls back on?” he snarls again. “That was just my default position. Being smarter than you. The other one was: ‘Why can’t Sherlock just be ordinary?’ Why? Maybe because ordinary wouldn’t have made Sherlock an international success.”
About Sexism in Sherlock:
All that is true, but at least one of the Sherlock scripts by Moffat and co-writer Mark Gatiss was savaged for sexism. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story A Scandal in Bohemia, Irene Adler is an adventurer who outwits Holmes; in the free adaptation of that story in Sherlock, as Jane Clare Jones put it in the Guardian 10 years ago: “[She is] remade by Moffat high-class dominatrix saved only from certain death by the dramatic intervention of our hero. While Conan Doyle’s original is hardly an exemplar of gender evolution, you’ve got to worry when a woman comes off worse in 2012 than in 1891.”
At the time Moffat, unsurprisingly, didn’t agree. “In the original, Irene Adler’s victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That’s not a feminist victory.”
At the time Moffat, unsurprisingly, didn’t agree. “In the original, Irene Adler’s victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That’s not a feminist victory.”
I last interviewed Moffat 10 years ago when he had left 7.9 million BBC Sunday night viewers on tenterhooks. Sherlock (Cumberbatch) had plunged from a building, possibly pushed by Andrew Scott’s Moriarty, seemingly to his death. We all knew the sleuth had to survive if there was to be a series three. But how? Perhaps the falling body was Moriarty in a Sherlock mask? Maybe pathologist Molly supplied a corpse to throw from the roof? No matter how many times I asked him, he wouldn’t reveal the secret. “There’s a clue that everybody’s missed,” he told me then, clearly taking pleasure from flummoxing not just me but millions of viewers around the world.
Moffat stopped writing Sherlock in 2017, but, for all that he claims he is not interested in writing more clever-clever crime storylines (“I’ve consciously tried not to write as aphoristically as I have in the past”), he can’t help himself. In Inside Man, for instance, Tucci’s Prof Grieff is essentially Sherlock solving crimes from his cell. Visitors bring him unsolved cases against which he pits his intelligence – aided by a terrifying serial killer in the next cell who has a photographic memory and who, for reasons I can scarcely account for, ate his mother’s foot.
Moffat stopped writing Sherlock in 2017, but, for all that he claims he is not interested in writing more clever-clever crime storylines (“I’ve consciously tried not to write as aphoristically as I have in the past”), he can’t help himself. In Inside Man, for instance, Tucci’s Prof Grieff is essentially Sherlock solving crimes from his cell. Visitors bring him unsolved cases against which he pits his intelligence – aided by a terrifying serial killer in the next cell who has a photographic memory and who, for reasons I can scarcely account for, ate his mother’s foot.
I'm just posting the Sherlock related comments, there is more about Doctor Who, the new show, etc. They don't mention The Time's Traveler's Wife which wasn't good, though. Lol.
Of course Moffat doesn't agree with the criticism about his writing being misogynistic.