The Casual Problem

BBC’s Sherlock enthralled hardcore fans with twists and character drama. But did it turn off casual viewers?

The day after the first episode of the most recent series of Sherlock, “The Six Thatchers,” aired, my British boss came into work and proclaimed that suddenly everyone on her Facebook feed was talking about how the show was going downhill. The strange thing, she said, was that none of these people had ever seemed to care about the show before. She had no idea any of them even watched it.

Sherlock is one of Britain’s biggest television exports. Each episode attracts 10–12 million viewers in the UK alone, and the third series averaged an additional six million viewers in the US. That’s nearly twenty million viewers before factoring in followers in the 200 countries in which it airs (including Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand) and everyone who streams it online, legally or illegally (it’s now on Netflix and Amazon). The theatrical release of last year’s Christmas special, “The Abominable Bride,” was the number one English-language release at the Chinese box office, overtaking Star Wars: The Force Awakens; it had an audience of 70 million in China alone.

That’s not all: within this massive worldwide audience, there’s a hardcore fanbase that follows the actors and the creators. The Sherlock fandom is hard at work between seasons, creating fan theories, fanart, fanfiction, and even fan teas. The San Diego Comic Con panels for Sherlock consistently draw huge crowds. And some fans spent over £3,000 for tickets to the official Sherlocked con, just for a chance to meet the stars.

Yet this season has received a cooler reception critically and, as my boss’ anecdote indicates, with audiences. Before the third episode, a split became apparent between the general audience reactions and those of the hardcore fanbase, many of whom continued to believe any inconsistency or unevenness in Sherlock is part of a larger plan, leading to a massive payoff. (After the third episode, hardcore fans and the general audience found themselves on the same page — neither group liked that episode much.)

Hardcore fans and invested viewers

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes as they appear in “The Abominable Bride.”

The turning point for Sherlock may have been “The Abominable Bride,” which aired a year ago. Hardcore fans were excited to learn that the episode’s well-advertised Victorian setting was, in fact, only a product of Sherlock’s drug-addled mind, and quickly went to work looking for hidden meaning in the hallucination. To other viewers, the whole thing was more of a mess. They went in expecting a somewhat straightforward Victorian alternate universe, and didn’t anticipate that pivoting to tie in with the show’s main plot.

Hardcore fans would call these viewers “casual” viewers, but there’s nothing casual about scheduling time to watch a show that only airs every two or three years, or even just remembering to record it — especially if you live outside the UK. So rather than “casual,” we consider this audience to be “invested” viewers. They don’t go to Sherlock conventions or chat incessantly on Tumblr, but they love the show, and they take it personally when it goes in directions they don’t like.

Hardcore fans watch the show with a different attitude altogether: they approach it like a literature professor would approach Ulysses. Each series of Sherlock ends on a cliffhanger, and hardcore fans band together to examine every detail of the show with a fine-tooth comb, seeking answers. The lengthy hiatuses between series give hardcore fans plenty of time to speculate, and as they watch the episodes again and again, they fall more and more in love with the characters. The goal of solving a mystery begins to take a backseat to learning more about Sherlock and John, and especially their close partnership.

Breaking the contract

Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the Sherlock showrunners.

Mark Gatiss, one of the show’s creators, takes the same attitude as the hardcore fans: “[I]t’s a show about a detective, not a detective show… the mystery generally takes a backseat to atmosphere and character. And we’ve definitely discovered that’s what people love the most.”

Is that true? To a point, it is. One of the things that elevates Sherlock over a standard crime procedural is the way character conflicts interweave with the central mystery; often, solving the mystery reveals something about how Sherlock and John relate to the world, and to each other. In recent episodes, particularly “The Abominable Bride” and “The Six Thatchers,” Sherlock has become more and more character-focused, catering to the desires of hardcore fans — the top 1% most engaged members of the audience.

In most fandoms, it would be smart to focus mainly on what to your most vocal fans are saying. But a deeper exploration of Sherlock fandom shows that for Sherlock, it’s not a good idea. With two to three years between series, everyone else finds it difficult to remember the details of what came before. Invested viewers haven’t spent hundreds of hours obsessing over Sherlock and John’s relationship, so they mainly want to watch crimes get solved in inventive, unusual, modern-Doylean ways. After all, that’s what they signed up for — what early episodes of Sherlock gave them in spades. This isn’t a procedural audience, but it isn’t one that would be content to watch the characters not solve crimes for 90 minutes, either.

It’s wonderful that the Sherlock showrunners would hear and value the top 1% of fans, and believe that mystery should “take a backseat to atmosphere and character” — but the changes they’ve made to reflect this insight have defied the show’s contract with invested viewers. To them, Sherlock is first and foremost a detective show, which happens to have a compelling central detective duo.

So it’s understandable that episodes like “The Abominable Bride” and “The Six Thatchers,” which provide plenty to chew on from a character standpoint, go over better with hardcore fans than invested viewers. Both episodes swerve away from the central mystery at around the halfway point and morph into something different (in “The Six Thatchers,” it’s a globetrotting spy thriller that happens to star Sherlock characters). Both episodes focus more on the characters’ stories than any crime to solve. Atmosphere and character over mystery. And the most recent series finale, “The Final Problem,” took this even further — there was hardly a mystery at all.

Maybe, as some hardcore fans posit, the invested viewers never really understood the type of show Sherlock was. Or maybe, as invested viewers will claim, the first two series made certain promises, and during the long hiatus between the second and third series, something changed. The third series didn’t keep these promises, and the fourth might not, either. And that is turning them off.

What now?

Viewership for the premiere episode is down about a million in the UK compared to the last series. It’s worth noting that the third series of Sherlock was the most-watched drama in the history of the BBC, so the show isn’t hurting; but if it continues down its current path, it might. And even though “The Lying Detective” was more of a return to form, it only drew 9.53 million viewers — the show’s lowest viewership since the first series. The series finale drew only 9.06. Perhaps invested viewers felt that two “character-driven” episodes in a row was enough.

This could be the last series of Sherlock. The showrunners have insisted otherwise, but Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s increasingly busy schedules make filming difficult. After the third and final episode of this series, general audiences weren’t clamoring for more, while hardcore fans were so dissatisfied with the finale that they hypothesized there was a secret fourth episode yet to air that would fix everything. (There’s not.) What’s happening with Sherlock now should serve as a lesson to other writers of twisty mystery series, especially those that air after long gaps — you can’t expect general audiences to be as forgiving, or attentive to detail, as your passionate fanbase. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to write for them, too.