Like many people living through the current state of the world, I’ve been searching for ways to settle my brain. Something to offer even a brief (privileged) reprieve from the horrors, the headlines, the general sense of doom. My anxiety’s high, my brain’s short-circuiting and I’ve had to find new coping mechanisms to help soothe the agitated static inside my head. It needs to be something that gives my brain a short break, engaging enough that it distracts me but doesn’t get me spiralling or thinking (yuck).
Over the past few months, I’ve found something that works perfectly. I’ve fallen into the arms of procedural dramas. I am a known TV lover, so it’s not that surprising, but I have never really gotten deep into these kinds of shows. You know the ones, a crime or legal case or something occurs at the beginning of the episode and within 45 minutes it has been investigated and resolved.
There comes a time in every mentally unwell woman’s life when she must abandon all highbrow television ambitions, when she can’t concentrate on high concepts and doesn’t want to delve into deep emotions. That’s when she turns to crime. Procedurals. If you’re thinking that these shows are a bit same-y and a bit silly, you’re correct. And that’s the point. I am not one of those people who finds rewatching things comforting – my brain begins to disengage if it already knows what’s next, leaving it to wander into the dangerous territory of real life. With procedurals, each episode is different, yet sort of the same. The joy of them lies in their gentle, soothing predictability. There is a pleasant repetitiveness, which means that having watched many seasons I can now tell immediately when someone is the killer simply by the way they enter an episode, or from the fact he randomly mentioned he is allergic to horses for some reason.
While the structure of all these shows is beautifully familiar, the vibes of one in particular set it above the rest, in my opinion: Elementary. This show has the immediate head start in two ways. One, Sherlock isn’t police. And two, it stars Lucy Liu, a woman so beautiful that I could watch 500 episodes of her sitting completely still in a room. Sherlock is charmingly weird and emotionally complex, with a random heroin addiction that the show deals with in an oddly grounded way, even when the other plots go absolutely bonkers. But the main thing I love about Elementary is that there is no will they/won’t they. The other procedurals, such as Castle and Bones, both immediately introduce that dynamic between the two leads and then you have to watch a lot of heterosexual nonsense going on until they finally hook up. I don’t need that in my show, it doesn’t bring me comfort and I don’t find it particularly thrilling. Joan and Sherlock have excellent chemistry but it’s not about sex at all, it’s about mutual admiration and figuring each other out as companions and crime solvers. Revolutionary!
The episodes are interesting enough to engage but repetitive enough that it’s like my brain has been put in a bird cage with a blanket over it. It’s an adult lullaby. These shows also don’t take themselves too seriously, which is an important factor. There’s a lot of moments where you have to suspend your disbelief, forget how legal procedure works and get on board with someone solving a crime by noticing a brand of soy milk in a fridge that blows the case wide open. Bones features a character who makes holograms of how victims might have looked in life based on their bones. The dated technology in these shows is charming and soothing as well. Flip phones and Sherlock being sceptical that this new “AI” would ever become a thing fill me with a sweet nostalgia for the days of yore. My body longs for this era and is calmed by it.
Obviously these aren’t perfect shows, they are largely from the 2000s where every sexy woman is a white stick-thin model, even though we all know in reality this Sherlock would [enthusiastically?] hook up with the full range of humanity for research purposes. But they are like an anxiety blanket for my sore raw little brain. I can put it on and my brain goes into a mode where I am engaged the perfect amount. It’s a small and necessary break, and if this is something you need I highly recommend it. It’s Elementary, my dear readers.
Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
