The best way to understand the problem with Sherlock is by comparing it to the anime Death Note. Both shows feature a "genius" detective, a man who displays an extremely high level of skill in his work. But whereas L is all around one of the greatest characters I have ever seen, Sherlock is, bluntly put, awful.

Why is that? Well, Both Sherlock and L are great at solving crime, but that is about where the similarity stops. With L, you have a character who demonstrates his intelligence every time he is on screen. His conclusions upon reviewing evidence are always understandable: you usually agree once you hear it, and you can see how they follow from the facts (but you may have trouble making the same deductions yourself). Similar things are true for the plans he comes up with. They're effective in reaching their goals, and they're not any more complicated than they need to be. Furthermore, you usually won't come up with something else that works better. This is what I would call an honest display of intelligence. L's plans are not clever because the script says so; they just *are* clever.

Writing a character like that requires the writer to be clever too, because otherwise they couldn't come up with these things. The only way to have your character make clever deductions is by making these deductions yourself. You can take more time doing it, so perhaps you can write someone just a little smarter than you are, but that's about it.

Then there are a lot of neat details, like how L sits, or how he holds stuff, how he has really poor posture, or how he has his assistant always go around giving everybody sweets. You can tell that there was real thought put into how such a person would live. This is why everything he does has so much gravity.

Sherlock, on the other hand, is in the running for the most naive conception of a genius I have ever seen in film. He has one super power, which is looking at someone and then "deducing" a variety of things about her or him, which normal people would miss. One problem with this is that his deductions are probably logically impossible. (By this, I mean that they probably don't follow from the facts on display even given infinite deductive power. Another way to say this is that there would be a different set of conclusions for which there exists an equally valid justification. "Hindsight bias" is a relevant concept here.) If true, this means it is not an honest display of intelligence, rather he's clever because the script declares that he is clever. The writers simply decide that every time he does his crazy deductions, they are correct, even if the evidence present wasn't enough to rule out alternative deductions.

But that's only the small problem. The big problem is that he isn't intelligent outside of his superpower. In fact, he's kind of a moron. In the first episode, he missed the big plot twist, which is something that I immediately thought of while watching. Think about that! Of course, just one minute later he will make deductions that exceed my abilities by some astronomical factor. But that's it: he's not smart, he's an idiot with a superpower... or, if we're being generous, an average guy with a superpower. He's the result of someone who isn't that smart themselves trying to write a genius. I've said early that you have to be about as smart as your character in order for you write him believably, and here we see what happens if you try to violate that rule. Sherlock is the result of someone writing a character who is supposed to be far smarter than themselves. They had some caricature in their head of what "genius" detective would be able to do, which is itself incorrect, and then they didn't extend it to every other situation.

The result: someone who is ridiculously overpowered in one very narrow domain and fairly average everywhere else. If Sherlock's abilities were genuine, he would actually be smarter than L; nothing L does reaches to that level. But it's a moot point, because as a matter of fact, L behaves more intelligently 99% of the time.

If you have not done so, watch Death Note. Notice how the the script deals with him differently. Notice how everything he concludes is actually supported by the situation. Bask in the joy of watching an *actual* genius at work. Because this show, this character, this isn't it.