Ah, rant mode. Game over.

To clarify further: Each Sherlock 'season' is a single drama, so if you have not seen all the episodes - if you have shunned any, indeed - then you are not acquainted with the full work, thereby rendering your criticism fairly worthless.

But you have pronounced judgements on me. I found the phrase "fatuous claims" rude, and responded fairly moderately I thought. I know Sherlock is superior to Elementary as surely as you know otherwise. There's really no point in pursuing the tiff, because it is going, and has been going for some time, nowhere. If…

If you shun Sherlock then you are in no position to assert or protest claims of intellectual superiority. And intellectual superiority is not the absolute measure of art anyway. I think you are in truth more interested in asserting your own intellectual superiority, simply because you prefer Elementary. I think…

Blimey, you don't half like to shake a thing do you? My advice: don't watch Sherlock. Stick with your perfectly adequate Elementary and calmness will descend.

Thank you for the aside, and you are quite right. Apologies. I should be asleep. However, despite the effects of age and insomnia, I maintain that Sherlock is altogether more exciting, unexpected and inimitable than Elementary, which is merely a generic detective show (in a fine American tradition of such). And so to…

Elementary's plots are thought up by a team of writers. Sherlock's plots have their genesis in ACD's original stories. I've no doubt which Sherlock his creator would prefer, as managing both felicity to the original and verve in its updating. I like Elementary, but it is pedestrian in comparison.

I enjoy Elementary, but I don't make a point of watching it. Each to his own.

Elementary is a fairly good American police procedural. Sherlock is a game changer. It's like comparing CSI with The Wire.