A shadowy cabal of influential media barons went to war with a lone mastermind earlier this year in the court. This, of course, was the legal battle between Sherlockian Leslie S. Klinger and the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which tried to argue that, more than 100 years after the first Sherlock Holmes story was published, Holmes had not yet passed into the public domain because not every story starring him had been written yet by Doyle.

The estate's licensing strategy was a novel one: demand licensing fees. And if the demandee pointed out that the character was more than 100 years old and thus in the public domain, threaten to sue.

In his ruling, 7th Circuit judge Richard Posner said not just that the estate was in the wrong but that Klinger had performed "a public service" by fighting the Doyle estate's lawsuit and awarded Klinger some $30,000 in court fees.

But the television world has long made a habit of creating almost-Sherlock versions of Doyle's famous consulting detective; so many that the abrasive, crime-solving para-cop genius trope is all over the TV dial—and, a little surprisingly, it remains popular in several different contemporaneous versions. Sometimes showrunners perform genre reassignment surgery on the fabled detective and his various pals: make irascible, drug-addicted Holmes a doctor, change his name so it's a synonym for its homophone, and instead of Holmes and Watson you have House and Wilson. Other times, they simply go with a few of the better ideas that the series of stories had over its years and adapt them without mentioning them (see also Psych, in which a consulting detective and his friend the doctor, excuse me, pharmaceutical salesman, aid the police).

We are now in something of a Sherlockian Renaissance, with no fewer than five shows that borrow liberally from Doyle's classic stories slated to appear on TV by the spring. And that's not even counting the Robert Downey, Jr. movies. Here they are: