Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Sherlock Holmes Mystery for U.S. Viewers as TV Channel Cuts Eight Minutes to fit its Schedules
Daily Mail ^ | 12 May 2012

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 ...


TOPICS: Books/Literature; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: sherlockholmes
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-23 next last

1 posted on 05/12/2012 10:22:56 PM PDT by nickcarraway
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

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.


2 posted on 05/12/2012 10:41:47 PM PDT by Haiku Guy ("The problem with Internet Quotes is that you never know if they are real" -- Abraham Lincoln)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

Now known forever as the “Sherlock” moment vs the now superceded “Heidi” moment.


3 posted on 05/12/2012 10:43:22 PM PDT by TaMoDee ( Lassez les bons temps rouler dans les 2012! Go Pack Go!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway
I was watching the 1953 film The Wages of Fear on a UHF station in Milwaukee many years ago when about 3 critical minutes disappeared from the end of the film.

If you are familiar with this film, the last 4 minutes are an interplay of sequences showing the driver, listening to a radio station while driving a truck on a dangerous mountain road, and a waitress in a seaside bar miles away, listening to the same song and dancing. The film inter-cuts from scenes of the driver (portrayed by Yves Montand) and the waitress he is going to visit, after completing the dangerous mission of driving nitroglycerine(!) over precarious mountain roads to a remote jungle site for use in stopping a raging oil well fire. Now that he is done he is playfully turning the steering wheel and, in effect, dancing with the truck to the music on the radio. Cut to the waitress who is dancing and happy, then suddenly a cut to the truck, a tie-rod fails and the truck goes off the road and falls into the canyon below. The waitress has a telepathic sense of shock and loss, then the credits roll.

Except in the version I was watching on Channel 18 that night. You see the truck driver tune in the radio station, then bam! - straight to the credits. Probably some production person at the last station that had shown the film had the film break, and rather than doing a precise ob of re-splicing it, he just tacked the credits on at the end and tossed the intervening footage.

This is where technology is really great. When film was literally on film stock, this kind of unintended editing could always occur. What does “director's cut“ really mean when you can have this kind of butchering? Now when distributed on DVD's at least the director can be sure that the version they intend to be seen is actually viewed.
4 posted on 05/12/2012 11:12:56 PM PDT by Wally_Kalbacken
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway
So PBS is cutting out scenes? Did they have one of their interminable pledge drives going on?

Anyway - good series, this new take on Sherlock Holmes.
5 posted on 05/13/2012 12:08:36 AM PDT by AnotherUnixGeek
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: AnotherUnixGeek

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.


6 posted on 05/13/2012 1:28:11 AM PDT by higgmeister ( In the Shadow of The Big Chicken!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: higgmeister

I have to admit...I hate this interpretation of Holmes and Watson. I do like the Downey version, however.


7 posted on 05/13/2012 3:50:26 AM PDT by freepertoo
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: higgmeister

I have to admit...I hate this interpretation of Holmes and Watson. I do like the Downey version, however.


8 posted on 05/13/2012 3:50:48 AM PDT by freepertoo
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

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.


9 posted on 05/13/2012 4:03:50 AM PDT by miss marmelstein
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: higgmeister

They don’t seem gay at all to me. Just English.


10 posted on 05/13/2012 4:05:18 AM PDT by miss marmelstein
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: miss marmelstein

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.


11 posted on 05/13/2012 4:59:09 AM PDT by MotorCityBuck ( Keep the change, you filthy animal!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: MotorCityBuck

Smaug in The Hobbit, and the villain in Star Trek II.


12 posted on 05/13/2012 5:26:15 AM PDT by DeaconBenjamin (A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you're NOT talking real money)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: DeaconBenjamin

Thanks for the heads up. Huge Trek fan.


13 posted on 05/13/2012 5:31:09 AM PDT by MotorCityBuck ( Keep the change, you filthy animal!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 12 | View Replies]

To: higgmeister
I had convinced myself I was going to hate this series, but I love the modern take on it. And Watson is cast as straight, and Holmes as more of an intellectual eunuch, in that he has an indifference to sex. He seemed to be attracted to the woman in the last episode, but was attracted more to her intellect than her sex appeal.

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.

14 posted on 05/13/2012 5:36:12 AM PDT by gramho12
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: miss marmelstein

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.


15 posted on 05/13/2012 5:42:14 AM PDT by wally_bert (It's sheer elegance in its simplicity! - The Middleman)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: wally_bert

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.


16 posted on 05/13/2012 6:21:08 AM PDT by miss marmelstein
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: Wally_Kalbacken

***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.


17 posted on 05/13/2012 7:46:00 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

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.


18 posted on 05/13/2012 8:53:17 AM PDT by battousai (Conservatives are racist? YES, I hate stupid white liberals.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: freepertoo

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.


19 posted on 05/13/2012 9:56:17 AM PDT by nickcarraway
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: gramho12
And Watson is cast as straight, and Holmes as more of an intellectual eunuch, in that he has an indifference to sex. He seemed to be attracted to the woman in the last episode, but was attracted more to her intellect than her sex appeal.

That was exactly the impression I got, and that aspect is quite true to the characters as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote them. Doyle's John Watson was a straight man, while Holmes simply had no interest in sex of any sort - he lived solely for intellectual challenges and filled the empty spaces in his life with cocaine and depression. And Irene Adler fascinated him in the written story, as she did in the new show.
20 posted on 05/13/2012 10:21:53 AM PDT by AnotherUnixGeek
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-23 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson