I’ve admired him for a long while and its finally great to be able to chat to so many people about him and his previous roles and the juicy ones he has lined up.

The actors in Mad Men just dont have that something special. The clothes arent enough to hook me in. I find the show cold and sterile. When Cumberbatch is on screen you cant take your eyes off him. He could have on screen chemistry with a chair – he’s that good! I’m excited .. you can tell… and there’s lots like me out there on the web.

I’m very interested in your comment about Sherlock vs. Mad Men as wish fulfillment. I think you’re right that Sherlock is more obviously the type of romanticized wish-fulfillment that resonates with fan traditions. Sherlock allows for romanticized notions of character, which only grow the more we learn about the characters with their romanticized, epic flaws.

Of course the Mad Men characters have fairly epic flaws too, but they’re not romanticized in the same way. And for Mad Men, there’s no hope that the characters will ever really work out their issues by finding solace and growth in each other, whereas that’s exactly the hope prompted by Sherlock and so many other fan-ready texts.

So is this an issue of genre? Perhaps an issue of two different manifestations of melodrama? And is the difference bred primarily by the cultural assumptions and associations of “quality” TV?

To connect this back to the question of Mad Men’s aesthetics-focused fandom, for Mad Men, there’s a sense that the characters are flawed and we know they’re flawed, but we also know that the furniture they’re using is beautiful, and so the one thing that can be celebrated seemingly-unproblematically (or at least with a more easily submergable caveat) is the aesthetics of the show?

Full disclosure: As someone who is trying to enjoy Mad Men (but failing), and was a fan of Sherlock before it even filmed, I’ve already got a stake in one fandom vs. another. I co-founded the oldest Sherlock fan site (http://sherlocking.org; we started a year ago, several months before the series was even filmed). Based on my interactions with a variety of Sherlock fans, I can guess at the appeal of this series and some reasons why it’s been embraced by a number of fan communities so quickly.

First off, the names and track records of Mr. Moffat and Mr. Gatiss were certainly more visible than Mr. Weiner’s to the general public (at least in the UK, where Sherlock has aired). And, I surmise, much of the initial Sherlock interest seems to have come from Doctor Who fans yearning for something to fill the gap until DW’s Christmas Special (series 5 just ending a few months ago). Though Gatiss appears to be more involved in the day-to-day showrunning and brings his own fandom from Crooked House, Doctor Who, The League of Gentlemen, and the Lucifer Box novels, much of the initial fan chatter seemed to attribute Sherlock to Moffat solely. Both Moffat and Gatiss (and Sue Vertue, producer and Moffat’s wife) joined Twitter shortly before the transmission of Sherlock’s “A Study In Pink” and have been active in promoting it in online ways.

Next, I think you’re absolutely correct that there’s been a century of fandom and scholarship around Sherlock Holmes, and I further note that he’s the most-filmed fictional character (over 230 different actors having portrayed him). Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories essentially created the detection genre, while in contrast, Mad Men exists in a genre space that’s a bit more ambiguous. Everyone from Charlton Heston to Roger Moore to Matt Frewer have played Holmes, and the curiosity over the new guy with the funny, posh name (Benedict Cumberbatch) likely drew many to the series initially. More broadly, curiosity over how this Holmes adaptation could even work — being set in the 21st century, not amidst gaslight and hansom cabs — likely brought many to it as well. It’s not a new IP by any means, and spillover interest from the Guy Ritchie film didn’t hurt. 🙂

Of course, Cumberbatch’s looks certainly have played a role as well; do a quick Twitter search for his name to see many women and men virtually throwing themselves at the guy, and Moffat’s writing in the first episode made a potential gay subtext an overt running gag, with Holmes and Watson often needing to explain that they’re not a couple, given reasonable, contemporary assumptions about their lodging situations at Baker St. This very quickly led to the (IMHO, a bit predictable) slash communities popping up — we saw the first slash posted within a few hours of the first ep’s transmission — as well as many other sites for fans to drool over the actors (take, for instance, the often amusing Fuck Yeah Sherlock).

Finally, we can’t ignore that the series premiere for Sherlock (dumped unceremoniously on a Sunday night in July, with virtually no promotion) reached over 7 million viewers (over 9 million, actually, after factoring in timeshifted iPlayer viewing data), averaging to over 7.2m (around 30% of the audience) watching on BBC1 and BBCHD alone. It reached quite high appreciation indices (87 and 88 for the first two eps), and generally excellent critical reviews. As we all know, Mad Men S4’s premiere didn’t top 3 million… and were the highest ratings its received yet.

Obviously, Mad Men is in a very different TV market, and again, these are not competing series, but the sheer numbers must speak to the quick mobilization of fans toward Sherlock. There are simply more people watching Sherlock, mainly in the UK at the moment, though our site has many active members from California, Italy, Lithuania, etc. Anecdotally, the number of female teenagers we have joining up on our site’s forums has been surprising and signficant — it’s been interesting to see how, for many, this has created a new interest in Sherlock Holmes and driven them back to the source texts. For these few, vocal fans, the series has been an impetus to investigate Holmesian fandom more broadly, and that’s a bit astounding to me.

I don’t mean to imply Sherlock is unproblematic (the racial representations in “The Blind Banker” are really a mess, and the series ended on a campy, awkward note, IMHO). But there is, ultimately, a form of fun wish fulfillment embodied by these characters that you don’t see in a series like Mad Men, perhaps leading to its appeal with a wide swath of fans. A “wish fulfillment” isn’t really what’s going on with these forms of alternate Mad Men fandom you point out — at least, I think I hope not? As Mad Men ostensibly seems to be about the breaking down of false veneers, Mad Men fans who embrace the ’60s aesthetic would seem to be either adopting some kind of ironic stance toward the highballs and cigarettes culture embodied in them, or are completely divorcing an appreciation of the aesthetic of the era from the overt message of the series, or are just oblivious to there being a disconnect between the series’ narrative and the fan practices.

Sherlock fandom seems much less complex and much more easily identifiable as, uh, “standard issue fannish,” for lack of a better term. Moffat describes the deductive capacities of Sherlock Holmes as the “only achievable superpower,” a simple, understandable takeaway for Holmes’ continued appeal across a number of interpretations — Mad Men, in contrast, is about something much more nuanced and, ideally, more complex than this (even if I remain unconvinced that it’s really as significant of a series as it thinks it is). Mad Men is overtly “quality TV,” which may excite academics and some viewers, but it won’t ever be as easy to translate into common internetty fan practices (slash, “squeeing,” fan vids, etc.) as a detective series with snappy writing, clever direction, a century’s worth of fans, rich source materials to revisit, and two attractive male leads about whom fans can easily speculate about a hidden homoerotic relationship.

Thanks again for the very thought-provoking post!