Posted on 05/12/2012 10:22:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
It has joined the ranks of Doctor Who and Downton Abbey as one of British TV's most successful exports to America.
But U.S. fans of Sherlock were left feeling a little short-changed after complaining that eight minutes of one episode has been mysteriously cut from the show. More than 3million viewers, double the prime-time audience average on the PBS network, tuned in this week to watch A Scandal In Belgravia, the episode featuring whip-smart dominatrix Irene Adler.
However, some amateur sleuths noticed a missing piece in the puzzle when harking back to the same episode they had watched previously on British DVDs or on illicit downloads.
It was elementary, some scenes from the 90-minute show had simply disappeared.
One viewer complained on a Sherlock Tumblr blog: 'They cut scenes. Good ones. What the hell... that makes no sense. It's frustrating...'
Another, writing on a web forum, said parts of the scene in Buckingham Palace had been snipped out as well as a shot in the taxi afterwards in which Sherlock shows Watson an ashtray he took, it was reported in The Independent.
'I think American audiences were deprived of seeing some of the humour that makes this series so clever, the viewer said.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I was doing shift work in Washington DC back in the early 1980s. A local TV station would play reruns of the old Mission Impossible! Series just as I was turning in at 2:00 AM. Every day they would cut off the last five minutes of the program to run their station sign-off.
Of course, the last five minutes of an old MI! Show was where all of the action happened. I always found it very amusing to watch these reruns, so I could imagine the ending for myself.
Now known forever as the “Sherlock” moment vs the now superceded “Heidi” moment.
I love the series but I could tell Steven Moffat had a hand in the production with Holmes and Watson being played as an ambiguously gay duo.
I have to admit...I hate this interpretation of Holmes and Watson. I do like the Downey version, however.
I have to admit...I hate this interpretation of Holmes and Watson. I do like the Downey version, however.
PBS has always had a history of editing British tv shows. They cut whole episodes from Upstairs, Downstairs and I had to buy the dvd to see the unexpurgated I, Claudius.
But there’s no doubt: Benedict Cumberbatch (what a name!) is going to be a huge star. A rightfully so.
They don’t seem gay at all to me. Just English.
LOL! It does justice to the Jeremy Brett series. Just two centuries layer. I like it. I have heard the Holmes character is to play a villian in am upcoming Batman, or Bond movie.
Smaug in The Hobbit, and the villain in Star Trek II.
Thanks for the heads up. Huge Trek fan.
Anyway, I think it's an interesting show, and I did notice that some things did not make sense in the beginning, and now I know why.
I did a fair amount of editing content of PBS shows ran locally, most of it due to language/nudity/offensive stuff.
I didn’t expect to like the new Sherlock but I do very much. The soundtracks have been picked up too.
The last episode did seem just a tad off and maybe this explains it.
I did find this week’s plot difficult to follow. My husband said it didn’t follow the original short story at all. It’s been many years since I’ve read Sherlock Holmes stories!
I would have loved to have seen the scene were Sherlock steals an ashtray from the Palace. I was once invited to the House of Lords and my fingers itched to swipe some of their stationary. My host said he would have killed me if I had, lol!
PBS cut a great deal of the first season of Upstairs, Downstairs because it was in black and white. A strike by technicians had forced that - and PBS stupidly thought that Americans wouldn’t like a black and white show.
***What does director’s cut really mean when you can have this kind of butchering? ****
I hate cut movies! After 1968, with the killing of Bobby Kennedy everyone blamed movies, tv, comic books, the NRA.
Movies on tv began to be butchered to remove all scenes of violence or implied violence. It was terrible to see old 1940s and 50s movies butchered! Movies from the 1960 really got the treatment!
When NBC showed THE WAR LORD it was butchered beyond reality! Several years later I saw it on the late show and they conveniently “lost TWO REELS” of the battle scenes.
What galls me is even today AMC still butchers films. TCM does not. IFC does not censor movies. They now chop them up for commercials.
When ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE was shone on TV for the first time it was butchered so much it actually started in the middle of the film during the auto race. I thought, “Did I miss half of the movie? Then it reverted to the start.
And when A FIST FULL OF DOLLARS was shown it was really cut up. They even filmed a bogus first scene of “the man with no name” getting orders to go to a border town to see what was going on there. They even filmed it with a dialog to lips mismatch.
My favorite comedy horror movie is Peter Jackson’s DEAD ALIVE. The US version has been so butchered it is unwatchable. The uncut version is much better (if you have a cast iron stomach). The uncut version was shown on IFC many years ago with no commercials and I got it on tape.
Here is an interesting web site on censored movies.
http://www.movie-censorship.com/
Warning, there are some x rated movies on this site.
I thought I was not going to like the new take when it first came out but have loved every episode since. I just download them in glorious HD and buy the bluray when they are out. Gave up watching PBS ages ago like most leftwing TV.
The Downey movie may have been good, but I don’t really think it was about Sherlock Holmes, except for the name. The characters called Holmes and Watson had nothing to do with the Conan Doyle characters, except the time period.
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