We were watching Death Valley tonight, in which Timothy Spall plays a retired actor who used to play a Colombo type character, and he’s also quite clever and helps the police solve crimes. It’s a pretty typical set up, but he also has a police partner who is a little bit goofy, but also makes key deductions, in fact I think most of the cases they solve require both of them to come up with answers.
That got me thinking about McDonald and Dodds, a show with a very similar set up, though both of them are police officers. Dodds is a quirky desk sergeant with a fantastic memory and eye for detail, and McDonald is the street detective who is initially saddled with him, but comes to realize that he’s very smart. Again, both of them contribute to solving the crimes.
All of this is in contrast to Sherlock Holmes or say Monk, where their companions are witless, or narrative foils. Or both I guess.
And then I wracked my brain for a long time, and that’s all I could come up with… but I’m sure there must be a bunch of others?
I’ve been watching episodes of the British detective series Professor T. with my mother, in which the protagonist is a criminology professor at Cambridge with severe OCD (and, probably, austism as well), with all the attendant quirks.
He works with several detectives in the local police department, who, while they aren’t able to make the leaps of logic that he can, are still very competent in their own rights, and play important roles in cracking the cases.
Well, there is the Late, GREAT Nero Wolfe mysteries from A&E. Yes Wolfe is a genius, but he can not function much without his man of action- Archie- and Goodwin has solved some tricky little things without Wolfe.
There’s a newer show called Ellis, or Inspector Ellis in some markets, starring Sharon D Clarke, and in that her partner DS Harper, played by Andrew Gower, is really smart. There’s a sequence in one of the initial episodes that really nails down who he is, and it was brilliant stuff.
Is that the case with modern adaptations of Holmes? Neither Martin Freeman in Sherlock nor Lucy Liu in Elementary are witless or foils. In fact, they’re more in line with the other “genius” detective shows of the 2010s, like Bones or The Mentalist, where the “sidekick” is actually very very good at their job, and the genius couldn’t solve mysteries without them.
Sally Kimball was the “muscle” behind Encyclopedia Brown, but she also had a pretty sharp mind of her own and even solved the occasional mystery herself.
Lucy Liu no, but in Sherlock they literally had a scene where Watson is replaced by a balloon on a stick and it doesn’t slow Holmes down at all. Freeman’s Watson offered moral guidance and occasional applied violence but didn’t contribute to the crime solving.
Shetland fits this pretty well for me. Jimmy Perez is the quiet, observant one, but Tosh is not just there to fetch things. She pushes back on his ideas, spots things he misses, and a few cases turn on her noticing a detail first. I started watching it because a neighbour kept lending me the DVDs, one series at a time, and I kept them longer than I should have. The scenery helps too, but the partnership is what kept me coming back.
On High Potential, the person that would be considered the ‘sidekick’ is the actual detective. And, while no one is going to be as good as Morgan, our lead eccentric, Karadec is a perfectly competent detective. In fact, the entire department is perfectly competent and would probably solve most of these cases on their own, even if it took longer.
Similarly, Psych. Shawn does the heavy lifting, but Gus, regardless of how unhappy he is to get roped into another case, is no slouch. Juliet and Lassie aren’t (generally) depicted to be bad at their jobs either, Shawn is just better, or at least faster.
I was going to suggest Inspector Gadget, but I’m not sure that fits the bill. That’s a case of a bumbling detective that looks good because someone else (Penny) is doing the work for him, without him realizing it.
Maybe House? I know it’s a stretch to call it a detective show, but it’s modeled after Sherlock Holmes. House’s rotating cast of team members, as well as Cuddy and Wilson are all very smart, very competent doctors, any one of which could have their own very successful private practice. They’re really only foils to the extent that House is so much smarter than them and from time to time they call him out for being an asshole.
Depends on how you view L&O Criminal Intent. The “genius” detective, Goren, is actually the sidekick. Eames is the senior partner. Not that she ever acts like it, but still…
That “cop and consultant” dynamic is actually fairly common: you also see it in The Mentalist, Bones, Lucifer, Castle and other shows. The cop is usually female, and they usually end up having sex.
I think Nigel Bruce’s depiction of Watson in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies kind of unfairly cemented Watson in the popular consciousness for a long time as a bumbling, witless comic foil to Holmes, but in the books Watson was a pretty capable character. He was a doctor, having served as an army doctor in one of the Anglo-Afghan wars, and in the fiction of the Holmes books he was the one who chronicled their adventures.
Holmes was the one who solved the mysteries, but as a sidekick Watson was far from witless. He wasn’t a ‘Gilligan’ type. Holmes needed him. I’d describe book Holmes as being a kind of detectiving savant on the Autism spectrum, and Watson as a very capable neurotypical.
I think more recent depictions of Watson are a little more kind, if maybe still not always quite accurate, to the Watson character.
Yes, he was a capable doctor and writer, but there are several points in the books where Watson takes it upon himself, or is deputised by Holmes, to do some investigating, and IIRC Holmes unfailingly remarks on how inept and unobservant Watson is. He eitehr doesn’t see the things of interest or does but utterly fails to make the right connection - leaving Holmes to step in and do so, of course. He is not a partner in crime-detection with valuable skills and insights. He is as the OP says the narrative foil, the yardstick against whom Holmes’ brilliance is measured.
We watched the first episode and he was definitely the sneering genius with a grudging admiration for that one smart cop/ex-student, and we meant to go back to it and didn’t. Thanks for mentioning it!
Exactly.
But the show is all edge cases. I’m pretty sure every patient would die without the erratic deductions of House (except that one time it was actually lupus).
In later seasons, Professor T seems to have morphed from a genius detective show to a quirky uptight British man’s personal struggles show. The actual police seem to do all the work these days.
There are many things that Gus is smarter about, too. Obviously his pharmaceutical knowledge comes into play sometimes, but even aside from that, there are quite a few times when his being a functional adult means that he knows things that Shawn doesn’t.
ETA: it just occurs to me that Gus being in pharmaceuticals is a reference to Watson being a doctor?
