Elementary - the TV series

OK, Sherlock Homes was the first "idiosyncratic" detective.

But now, we've really got a glut of these crazy geniuses - from the guy on Numbers to the guy on Criminal Minds to the guy on Perception to the guy on Psych (with the photographic memory and the extroverted desire to be the center of all attention) and so on and so on. And of course there's the jerk that is House when you get to the medical dramas.

So now we;ve got a modern day Sherlock Holmes who is apparently going to be an absolute creep...

I suppose you can't really judge a TV show by a single 'teaser ' but it looks like that's exactly what his character's going to be.

It's too bad Lucy Liu (who plays Watson) isn't co-starring in The Adventures of Charlie Chan, as I had heard rumors this was in the works. But I suppose the Asian lobby raised a stink, which is really too bad - as I love Charlie Chan.

In the books, written in the 30s when racism against Asians was rampant, Charlie Chan immigrated from Hong Kong to Hawaii when he was 16, so English was not his first language, so of course he didn't speak it very well. But - despite the fact that he did not speak grammatical English, he proved time and again that he was several orders of magnitude smarter than anyone else. (IN the movies, the racism of the white cops was used as comic relief but also was important - because the white cop would look down on him, until Charlie showed how smart he was and how dumb the white cop was. Then the cop would invariably realize his mistake and accept Charlie as the superior police officer and an equal human being.

In this day and age where immigrants to this country who are mocked by certain individuals because they don't speak good English and a lack of good English skills is viewed as a lack of intelligence, a role model like Charlie Chan would be ideal.

Instead, we get Elementary.