SHERLOCK HOLMES, popular culture’s most famous private detective, may not be an actor-proof role, but almost anybody can play it once — anybody, that is, with a passable English accent; a long, narrow face; a penetrating gaze; and the ability to rattle off complicated sentences at head-splitting speed. In the movies the great sleuth has been portrayed by, among others, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Nicol Williamson, Robert Stephens, John Neville, Jonathan Pryce, Peter Cushing, Ian Richardson, and, most recently, Robert Downey Jr., all of whom sensibly took the part in just one or two films. (Mr. Downey has bravely signed on for a third.) The true test of a Holmes, though, is whether an actor’s interpretation can bear the weight of repetition, because Holmes was, after all, a series character, who appeared in 56 short stories and 4 novels between 1887 and 1927. The author Arthur Conan Doyle sometimes wearied of the character, and once even tried to kill him off, but the public wouldn’t allow Doyle to leave his hero forever at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes came back, and has been coming back ever since, again and again and again.


This season Sherlock Holmes will be coming back weekly in the new CBS series “Elementary” (beginning Thursday). Jonny Lee Miller, playing a modern-day incarnation of the character, faces, as Doyle did, the challenge of keeping himself, and his audience, interested over the long haul, story after story, deduction upon deduction, a new game afoot every time. In “Elementary,” created by Robert Doherty, Holmes is a recovering drug addict living in a New York City brownstone owned by his father, who’s back in England; as a condition of his tenancy Sherlock has to stay straight, which requires the live-in presence of a “sober companion,” in the person of Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu). He consults on cases for the police department and, of course, brings the slightly puzzled Dr. Watson along for moral and, increasingly, practical support. Joan Watson, like her male counterpart in Doyle’s stories, represents the perspective of all those in the audience who are not Holmes-level geniuses — which is to say everyone.


The regendering of Watson might trouble the odd Sherlockian purist, but to most American TV watchers it should look pretty natural: we’re used to seeing eccentric male investigators with female sidekicks. In “The X-Files” spooky Mulder had sober Scully. And in “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” the brilliant but emotionally unstable New York City Police detective Bobby Goren — probably the closest thing to an all-American Holmes we’ll ever see — had a lady Watson, too: his long-suffering, eminently sensible partner, Alex Eames.


Teleporting Holmes from the late Victorian era to our own time shouldn’t seem especially jarring, either. The Masterpiece Theater-BBC series “Sherlock,” which so far has had two terrific (short) seasons, also plops its angular hero, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, squarely in the information age, where he appears to be perfectly at home. The Holmes of “Sherlock” is something of a techie, as wizardly with his laptop and smartphone as the original Sherlock was with his test tubes and reeking beakers. (Mr. Miller’s Holmes is less I.T.-reliant, but he does wield his iPhone with some panache.) And besides, the movies’ archetypal Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was in modern dress in all but the first 2 of his 14 performances of the role in the late 1930s and the ’40s.


Those last 12 pictures were B movies, barely more than an hour long — more like TV shows, really — and Rathbone was the first of the great serial Holmeses. He conformed with eerie exactitude to Doyle’s description of the character in the first Holmes tale, “A Study in Scarlet”: “In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawklike nose gave his whole expression an alertness and decision.” It wasn’t just his appearance: his quick movements and clipped, urgent speech seemed Holmes to the life.