Sherlock and the power of revision

We are obsessed with the BBC series Sherlock. Absolutely devoted, rivaling our love for Downton Abbey. So we have Season One on DVD and we watch all of the extras and commentary, you know, like dorks do. (Don't get me started on Deadwood, a whole other obsession).

Anyhow, the other night we noticed "A Study in Pink: The Pilot" on the DVD. A Study in Pink is the first episode of the series, but this was the pilot episode – a one hour show they produced, shared with BBC, and were told that yes, this is great. But it was so good that they wanted three 90 minute movies, as opposed to more episodes of a one hour show. They couldn't just add another 30 minutes to what they had, that wouldn't work. So they had to dismantle the whole thing and rethink it.

So they revisited A Study in Pink, revisited the script, the plot, the subplots. That is evident from watching the pilot. They rethought where specific scenes should take place, which shots should be used, how the dialogue would be delivered. Even the scenery is altered (221B Baker Street gets some fantastic new wallpaper). In some scenes, the pilot is very much like the first episode. But in other cases it's much different, and the longer version is far superior. Not only did they get much better cameras for the 90 minute version, they had that luxury of revisiting and reworking the entire script.

This was a good lesson for me, courtesy of the genius minds who recreated Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. Revision may be a lot of work – a lot of reworking what you already thought you had done. But it's not a drag, it's not a pain. It's a second chance to make something terrific into something brilliant.