Tony Lee, a comic book and screenwriter, attended an 'Elementary' convention in Birmingham recently. There he talked about his books featuring the Baker Street Irregulars as well as a crossover audio play for Big Finish which teams up Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray.
But his big news was about his hopes to transform his fixation on Professor James Moriarty into a TV show. He has a TV show in development with Lee David Zlotoff (the creator of MacGyver) about a modern-day descendant of Moriarty. This American Moriarty finds out that he's the last surviving male heir of the Napoleon of Crime... and that he's inherited Moriarty's criminal empire.
Somebody's out there tagging this prospective series as a "Sherlockian Blacklist", but that doesn't worry me. You have to condense it to a sound-bite to sell it to the network suits. Remember, 'Star Trek' was being hyped as 'Wagon Train To The Stars'.
Should 'The Last Moriarty' make it to the small screen, I think it will find a welcome home in Earth Prime-Time; it won't have to be banished to some alternate Toobworld like 'Sherlock' and 'Elementary' had to be. Of course if it turns out that somebody from the original stories survived (steampunk cryogenics, Adam Adamant?), like Holmes or Watson or great-grandpa Moriarty himself, or if they show the Professor in a flashback and he's not Eric Porter, then we'll have to chuck it out with the others.
BCnU!
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