Elementary heads to London when season two kicks off this fall, and executive producer Rob Doherty is already eyeing stories for the premiere.
"Obviously we have some big thoughts and plans for London," Doherty told reporters.
Though specifics for the first episode have yet to be locked down (Doherty noted that the writers reconvene in the next week or so), the new season will kick off another story. According to a description released by CBS, in the premiere, "Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is called to London to revisit an old case and is forced to face his past. Meanwhile, Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) learns more about Holmes' mysterious life and the company he kept prior to leaving for New York."
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Because of the direction Elementary's freshman run took with heavier subject matter for Sherlock (see: Moriarty and Irene), it was important to give the protagonist some relief after going to some dark places.
"We tried to write a proper ending to this first season and we will look to launch new things coming into season two," he said.
When Elementary crosses the pond to film the premiere, will other members of the NYPD be joining them?
"The story's still being developed," Doherty said. "My guess is it would only be Sherlock and Joan. Story-wise, it might be hard to justify a trip for all of our players. I'd love to have Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn) there." He also said that right now, it is unclear if and how Irene (Natalie Dormer) will factor into the London episode.
As Doherty explained it, the format for season two will be in a similar vein to that of the first, which became more serialized as it went on.
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"The reason these last few were so serialized is because we wanted to build to Irene and then ultimately to Moriarty, so it's not the kind of story you can spring in just one episode," Doherty said. "I predict next season will feel in many respects like this one. We will absolutely have standalone stories and cases but there will be certain stories that you can arc over a run of shows."
What those multi-episode arcs will be has yet to be determined, with the start of the new season consisting mostly of "cases of the week." "We still have to identify what kind of story we want to build and tell over four, five or six episodes," he said. "We'll see how it shakes out. When we think we have an opportunity to serialize something, we will absolutely take it. Getting into our first run next year, we'll probably have a big batch of relatively standalone mysteries."
It was crucial that London, Sherlock's old stomping grounds, be on the back burner for the first season of the CBS drama -- to firmly establish its ground in New York City before venturing overseas.
"The reasons we wanted to set the show in New York in the beginning, they were twofold. First and foremost we absolutely wanted to be able to draw an American audience to the show -- and setting it in a city like New York, which in many respects echoes London, helped a lot," Doherty said.
"The other reason was it seemed interesting [to have Sherlock back in London]," he added. "I started from a broken Sherlock, that was always what intrigued me. I loved the idea of doing a Sherlock who had bottomed out and was in repair. So the idea that he had left London, it fit quite nicely into what we wanted to do. There was a good strong reason for him to have gone to New York City."
Elementary returns for season two this fall.
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