Same old new season, part 2

Elementary: I am something of a Sherlock Holmes buff, though most real buffs would probably think me a pantywaist. I have not read all, or even most, of the Doyle stories; I enjoy more the homages and pastiches of other authors; my favorite incarnation of the great detective is Basil Rathbone. Yes, I know that Nigel Bruce played Watson as too much of a nincompoop bumbler, and many fans prefer Jeremy Brett in the British TV versions, but for me, Rathbone will always be the #1 Holmes. I don't like the modern updating from the BBC with Benedict Cumberbatch--part of the problem is the BBC series problem that most episodes are 90 minutes or more and feel padded because they should be 60 minutes. This modern version is under an hour and there is promise in the situation, but I don't care for the actors. Jonny Lee Miller is Holmes, a British detective living in the United States, who has just come out of rehab (nice touch). Lucy Liu is Watson, a woman being paid by Holmes' father to be his companion to make sure he stays out of trouble. Aiden Quinn, who looks better now than he did in his heyday, is the police captain with whom Holmes works. I didn't like the pilot, and I haven't seen any more, though I might drop back in on it to see if it finds a groove. But since my problem involves the lackluster performances given by the two stars, that seems doubtful.

666 Park Avenue: As above, there is promise in the set-up: Satan and his lovely minion (Terry O'Quinn and Vanessa Williams, above) own a grand old apartment building in Manhattan, and they make deals with various tenants; the tenants get what they want (talent, fame) but if they don't make good on their end of the deal, they are snatched away into Hell--or at least into the apartment building walls. I was looking for this to be an anthology series of sorts, with a different person dealt with in each episode, but while that may happen, there is a arc story which involves a nice young couple who has been hired to manage the building. My problem with that, as with American Horror Story last year, is this: why would this couple hang around for an entire season when they begin to realize what they've gotten into? A mini-series would seem to be the better outlet for that. The first scene of the pilot was nicely creepy: a musician playing violin on stage in an orchestra suddenly finds his fingers bleeding copiously, realizes that O'Quinn is watching from a box, and races out of the theater to his apartment, where O'Quinn makes him pay the price for his failure to carry out whatever he was supposed to do. But the show got boring pretty quickly after that and I haven't made a return visit.