Shooting most effectively on so many cylinders is Robert Doherty's "Elementary." It's the smartest, most intimately passionate iteration of Sherlock Homes around, and that's saying a lot, considering that we're in the midst of a bull market for all things Holmes.

The secret to the Holmes craze is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's crime buster is little more than an assemblage of data points in search of a human to hang them on: the pipe, disguise skills, the love of a seven-percent-solution of cocaine, the seething contempt of women, the superhuman deductive reasoning. He's so under-written that revisers can't resist him. And so Guy Ritchie rendered him an action hero his Sherlock Holmes films. Steven Moffat's "Sherlock" gave us a short-run take on a tech-hip, maybe asexual, couture rock star-style version of the detective. Putin only knows what the Russians are doing in their own remake, but with American cable TV's import craze being what it is, we may find out soon.

"Elementary" has proven that trad TV is by far the best fit for our strange detective. Like basic TV narrative, Doyle's stories, in form, style, narrative and resolution, offer the guaranteed pleasures of absolute, unchanging familiarity. There's some surprise in who did it, and even more in how and why, but what you're here for is old friends doing the same old things the usual way. (One wonders how much pleasure Doyle took at hiding the utterly queer relationship between these gentlemen in plain sight. Whatever the case, read today, the stories often come off as pre-emptive 'shippers.)

"Elementary" makes big changes in its source: London becomes New York. The queer element becomes the basis of endless future gender studies papers as John Watson becomes Joan (played with born-New Yorker charm by Lucy Liu). Doyle's cross-dressing, weird cowboys, Mormon freak-outs, forced wig-wearing and other bits of kink are dumped in favor of sundry despicable 47-per-centers and Ayn Rand fans. Most radically, Doyle's stick figure of a detective is made a fully fleshed human, in stories free of the ultra-violent problem-solving and standard-brand cynicism that soils the likes of "The Blacklist." Not many shows—cable or network—have the courage and heart to end an episode as "Elementary" did, leaving quandaries unresolved as its characters notice, together, wordlessly, the healing beauty of the East River at sunset.