Remote Patrol: Two Englishmen in New York with Elementary and Forever

Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.

Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.

Elementary and Forever: Two Englishmen in New York

The British are coming, the British are coming... back, in the case of Elementary's Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller), who returns for a delayed-by-football third-season premiere. The sleuth himself is said to have spent the past eight months working for MI6 in London, but left due to what he wittily terms "creative differences".

His return to NYC - and the NYPD - is a rocky one, however, as he brings with him a new protégée, Kitty Winter (Guardians of the Galaxy's Ophelia Lovibond), a cheeky Brit who instantly clashes with Sherlock's former mentee, Joan Watson (Lucy Liu).

Their conflict proves quite physical. "I got into a baton fight with someone named Kitty?" Watson asks incredulously after a combat scene pulled off with aplomb by action-movie vets Liu and Lovibond (that's right - Kitty literally causes a catfight!).

Soon enough, the unwieldy trio teams up to take down the widow (guest star Gina Gershon) of a drug kingpin who's taken over his cartel and wiped out a key witness.

The murder takes place in an enclosed elevator, making it one of only seven pure "locked-room mysteries" Sherlock says he's encountered in his life. But of course he's a crime-solving genius, so he relishes the challenge almost as much as Miller relishes this role, spitting out huge chunks of dialogue with breathtaking precision.

Now that Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston is gone, perhaps Miller will get the serious awards-show consideration he deserves - he's one of TV's best dramatic actors.

The addition of Lovibond serves two purposes - she will hopefully attract a younger audience, which Elementary has struggled to snare (it doesn't help that CBS aired the show opposite demographic steamroller Scandal and now it's getting a late start against this season's biggest new hit, How to Get Away with Murder).

It also relieves Miller and Liu of the pressure to appear in nearly every scene. With only cops Aidan Quinn and Jon Michael Hill to help carry the burden, the show has always felt a bit underpopulated.

The seemingly timeless Brits-in-New-York crime scene is getting a bit crowded these days, as Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) has returned to crack Upstate cases on season two of Fox's Sleepy Hollow.

And now Welshman Ioan Gruffudd is starring in a new ABC mystery, Forever, as a 200-year-old pathologist who assists NYC's ME's office, all the while trying to lift the curse that has made him immortal.

Forever bears more than a few eerie resemblances to Elementary as well as Sleepy Hollow. All three shows offset their white male Anglo leads with ethnic brunette partners - Liu, Sleepy Hollow's Nicole Beharie and Forever's Alana de la Garza (one of my favorite ADA's ever on Law & Order).

The most recent Forever flashed back to the 1880s, aka the Sherlock Holmes era; Watson remarks in Elementary's season opener that Sherlock made her read the works of criminologists from the Victorian age. And Forever's present-day crime in question involved a boxer (Juan-Pablo Veza) who seemingly overdosed on heroin - recovering-addict Sherlock's drug of choice.

Forever is a perfectly pleasant piece of fluff, aided immensely by the expert support of Orange Is the New Black's Lorraine Toussaint as a no-nonsense NYPD lieutenant and Taxi's Judd Hirsch as an antiques store owner who knows Gruffudd's secret. Early ratings indicate it may not run forever, but its appeal is, in a word, elementary.