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The Abominable Bride came across as 90 minutes of self-congratulation. First, for the creators who made the show, and then for the audience tuning into it.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been too surprising that the Sherlock special spent most of its time on fan service. Its very existence was a bit of it, trying to give fans a holdover taste of the role that shot Benedict Cumberbatch to fame during a three-year hiatus while he and co-star Martin Freeman go about being two of the most demanded British actors of the moment. Realistically, they probably needn’t have bothered. As much as Cumberbatch is a uniquely qualified Sherlock — the man is an alien in the David Bowie mode, such that even just looking at him makes you feel removed but somehow unworthy — Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective is absolutely everywhere on television, in ancestral DNA if not always in name (although of course there is also Elementary, though that tends to feel like a descendant who was named in honour of his grandfather).

Virtually every detective story that followed in the wake of the original Sherlock Holmes stories owes something to it, even if it’s just careful attention to a crime scene. But that generic influence filters down into something more concentrated on television, where our heroes — or, really, anti-heroes — are more particularly Holmesian than anything else.

Every detective story that followed the original Sherlock Holmes stories owes something to it

The entire CSI franchise is Holmesian in the sense that its relentless attention to blood spatters and glass breakages wouldn’t even be sensible without 100 years of pop cultural priming for the integrity of a crime scene. Marinate on the fact a bunch of stories helped turn that into standard practice if you ever want to feel horrified about what the justice system might be like a century after shouty courtroom dramas.