Well here’s the Superman problem. At some point it’s the same thing over and over again…huge problem till the end of the story where House outsmarts everyone. You could time most episodes, whatever disease they were talking about 5 minutes before the hour was up was what the patient had! But they could only go so far with it, I’m not even sure Sherlock Holmes himself could go on forever.

While both films were ok, they were too much enamored with the ability to be fast paced with explosive fighting and stylistic effects. They missed the real human angle of Holmes which is a man who is able to notice everything and because of that is incapable of normal human relations but is a fantastic detective.

You always see the reason why the baddies do what they do and you can understand without necessarily approving

I’m thinking more here of the Queen. She is sadistic and cruel but also quite human. I’m thinking here of the scene where she and her husband chat about the fact that their marriage is a loveless fraud, yet they still have a measure of respect for each other. Likewise when she warns Ned’s daughter not to trust or love anyone but her own children, you see why she is the way she is. But you also see why her son is such a sadistic little thug.

But compare this all to what they did to Star Wars. while the newer films do have merit they are nowhere near the complexity of these stories that TV offers us these days. Even The Lord of the Rings movies only manage be up to par with the best TV has to offer.

At first. Then it went downhill as they slid away from the rational into the irrational/emotional.
The same can be said of Numb3rs, another series that started in the intellect and wound up in the will, though the slide was not quite so bad as for House.

Game of Thrones, a.k.a. “Don’t Get Too Attached”, is oddly realistic in that fashion. You always see the reason why the baddies do what they do and you can understand without necessarily approving. Even when the goodies do things, they often act on incomplete of false information, like when Catelyn seized Tyrion and took him to the Eyre, thus starting the war. Joffrey seems to be the bull goose loser on this score. He’s a sadistic little twerp. So is the Mountain, except he’s not little.

But in the Game of Spock and Bones, Bones always wins in modern culture.

It is true there are other forms and so I exagerrated. But the fact is that it is a fascinating a paradox that science fiction is so often futuristic in technology but premodern in ethos.

I think the villian in Homes was pretty calculating. I esp. liked the touch of politeness he had, putting a blanket around Holmes’s shoulders as they played a game of chess on a cold night. The problem IMO is swear words saved TV but computers ruined film. Ever since the new Star Wars movies, I’ve noticed that filmes have a habit of trying to stuff every minute with more action, more effects. TV, though has become so much better.

Consider the Walking Dead which features not only one of the most fascinating villians (the Governor, who you can really see is the type of person who could be both your favorite next door neighbor and totally evil given the proper circumstances) but probably the most pressing case for an abortion ever (a pregnancy from adultery by the wife of the lead character in a zombie ridden world). And importantly the decision not to have one had real consquences for everyone around…something Star Trek often avoided with their ‘prolife’ storylines.

Or consider the Game of Thrones series almost all of whose villians have a lot of humanity to them (except the boy King, a 14 yr old twerp who you really want to see killed). I could name a dozen other great series….House, for example, was a much smarter take on Sherlock Holmes than the latest film version.

What made this possible IMO was the ability of TV to loosen the strings on censorship of swearing and sex and its ability to take its time to build a story the way a novel is free to spend hundreds of pages developing characters and plot.

Spock was a much more interesting character in the reboot than he ever was on TV, and Zachary Quinto was a much better Spock than Leonard Nimoy.

Indeed, the only character who WASN’T better written and better acted in the reboot was Scotty. Normally, I love Simon Pegg, but he was awful in a badly written part.

It’s not hard to find works even you’d have to concede are hopeful. Take Lois Bujold, Eric Flint, etc.

(Note, BTW, that either you’re wrong, or jason taylor is wrong. You can’t both be right.)