Steven Moffat on CBS's Elementary

Sherlock show-runner Steven Moffat has given his thoughts on CBS‘s Sherlock Holmes pilot Elementary which will star Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu.

The CBS pilot is a modern-day updating of Sherlock Holmes (sound familiar) set in New York with Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as his side-kick Joan Watson. The fact that CBS are developing a modern-day Sherlock Holmes has attracted considerable comparison with BBC One‘s Sherlock – especially from the producers behind the series. Now it’s show-runner Steven Moffat has given his thoughts on Elementary.

Moffat told is quoted by BBC Radio as saying that he was “annoyed” by Elementary especially as CBS had originally approached the producers of Sherlock about remaking it for an American audience. Moffat also said there was a concern over what Elementary would do to the brand saying ‘The bigger problem for us with Elementary is, what if it’s terrible? What if it’s awful? Then it degrades the brand’

However, he did admit that there was little they could do about Elementary on as basic level as they didn’t own the rights to Sherlock Holmes. ‘  We don’t own Sherlock Holmes. … We don’t even own the idea of updating it. It’s been done before. I hope they know their Sherlock Holmes very, very well indeed because we know what’s in our show and wasn’t in the original. So if we did discover our material had made it into somebody else’s show we would have a problem with that. If there is no such incidence of that, then there’s nothing we can object to.’

Sherlock producer Sue Virtue had previously stated they would be paying close attention to Elementary to make sure it didn’t copy Sherlock in any way.