Moffat's Magic

Steven Moffat's Sherlock started a rerun on Wednesday, filling the gap in the schedules from the completion of The Apprentice, and watching it again knowing the outcome let me appreciate the hints that had been put in place throughout the episode.  Before the initial airing, people were worried about trying to turn the Sherlock Holmes stories into a modern day piece, but these worries went unrealised.  The entire production was excellent, the relation between the two leads often getting highly praised and quite rightly so, but all the other aspects I feel are exectuted brilliantly too, and I for one am looking forward to the rest of this rerun before the next series.

This isn't the first show that Moffat's written where I've been thoroughly impressed by some of the writing.  Coupling and his Dr Who episodes have a tendancy to be very clevelry done, and while enjoying the stories I always appreciated the tightness (for want of a better word) of the writing.  Case in point in the first episode of the fourth series of Coupling where you have the show done in 3 parts following 3 main couples and the overlaps between them continue to unfold right through to the final minute with you learning more about the earlier scenes by watching them from a different perspective.  A clever idea, and the execution is flawless.  Other episodes have had long conversations that were completely double ended, scenes done in parallel to previous ones and double screens - following two groups with sound alternating between them.  I'm a huge fan of the comedy, but these clever little tweaks make it different to the rest and are all done well.

His other majoy success was in Dr Who.  Before he took over the reins from Russel T Davies who had resurrected the series and made it essential viewing, he'd written some of the more memorably episodes.  Blink is still quite possibly my favourite episode, and the Silence of the Library and the Empty Child double features were for many the stand out episodes of their respective series, wonderfully self-contained and showcase some of his talents.  But I think that's been shown even more since he took over as head of the production, and the penultimate episode of the last series - the Pandorica Opens was truly spectacular, and the scene where the Doctor shouts to his collected enemies was brilliant - and When a Good Man Goes to War also stunned me with its brilliance, and I can't wait to see the outcome when it returns.

I believe that Moffat is one of, if not the best writer in British television, and I can't wait to see anything else he works on.  The return of Dr Who and Sherlock are events that I can not wait for, and I hope that he has more ideas up his sleeve for other programs.