my dear watson.
So Lucy Liu was cast as Joan Watson in Elementary, CBS's adaptation of Sherlock (which, as you remember, is also an adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle books from the nineteenth century), and fandom is, shall we say, displeased. These are my two cents: maybe not the brightest pennies in the box but it's my metaphor and I'll mangle it if I want to.
I know that the BBC version of Sherlock is a precious thing to many of us and a lot of people don't want to see it become tarred in any way by Elementary, which people are already sure is going to suck by the sheer virtue of it being American. There's talk of "shitty adaptations" and "it's not Sherlock Holmes without London" and "stop ripping off good British TV" and even "CBS is homophobic and cutting out the slash potential by making John Watson a woman"-these are all legitimate concerns. I understand where you're coming from and the problematic concepts you're trying to address.
But as for the casting of Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, if you could take a second and ask yourself this: how many female Asian-American live-action TV characters can you name from when you were young?
Can you name any?
I asked around tonight, gave people about a minute to answer. The first friend I asked (an Asian-American male) couldn't name a single one. The second (also an Asian-American male) named the Yellow Ranger and Mulan. My sister named the exact same ones I came up with. Now, we're all university-age, so maybe we've missed a few in between our piano lessons and SAT books. But I guarantee you, this is the kind of thing kids like us looked out for when we were young; if there was an Asian on our TV, we knew about it. Hey, everyone, put down your rice bowl and pay attention. And it wasn't just my family-John Cho's family did it, and maybe yours did, too. (Mine still does; old habits die hard.)
As a teenager, I never identified with Rory Gilmore on Gilmore Girls (2000), but as for her best friend, Lane Kim, played by Keiko Agena? Oh, I was Lane Kim-traditional upbringing, overbearing parents, the desperate need to escape cultural restrictions. And maybe I was never a spaceship interface (Lexa Doig as Rommie on Andromeda, 2000) or a Starfleet communications officer (Linda Park as Hoshi Sato on Star Trek: Enterprise, 2001) or a Cylon sleeper agent (Grace Park as Sharon Valerii on Battlestar Galactica, 2004), but they were my favorites anyway. Why? Because they were smart, competent, and in the right light, they almost looked like me.
But other than that? I can't recall a single other Asian-American female regular character on all the live-action TV shows my family watched. Not on 24 or The West Wing or CSI or Law and Order or Firefly. (Rosalind Chao played Keiko Ishikawa-O'Brien on Star Trek: TNG way back in the late '80s/early '90s, but she wasn't a regular, and her main purpose on the show was to create marital discord and have a baby during a shipwide crisis. And I suppose Lana Lang on Smallville (2001) does count because Kristin Kreuk has some Chinese ancestry; I'll include her for completeness' sake.)
I mostly stopped watching TV around the time I went to university, but I kept hearing of female Asian roles popping up on TV: the half-Tibetan (!) Dichen Lachman and the Filipina (!!!!) Liza Lapira on Dollhouse (2009); Ming-Na as the (canonically lesbian!) Camille Wray on Stargate Universe (2009); Jenna Ushkowitz as Tina Cohen-Chang on Glee (2009); and Grace Park as Kono Kalakaua in Hawaii 5-0 (2010). Out of these I've only seen H50, but let me tell you, Kono Kalakaua is not a weak character by any means.
So what am I complaining about, right? There are a fair amount of examples here. Asian-American women aren't completely invisible in today's media-I just named about ten.
Ten.
Ask me to name Caucasian female characters and I'll keep going till you stop me. Ask me about African-American women and I can name ten easily, ponder out ten more and then Wikipedia another ten. I'm not playing Oppression Olympics here, but I'm just saying. Women of all ethnicities have it rough in the media; I couldn't name five characters played by Latina/Chicana women, or women from the Middle East or South Asia or South America, or, goodness, Native American women. But there's at least one Caucasian woman on every American TV show, and as for Caucasian men? It's a given.
So am I glad Elementary's Watson is now a woman? Yes. Am I glad she's a woman of color-a woman of my color? Definitely yes. (I'd actually prefer Lucy Liu as Holmes and Jonny Lee Miller as Watson, but I'll take what I can get.) If Elementary was about two white guys running around solving crimes-sorry, but you'd have to count me out. The pair in BBC's Sherlock are already white and male; I really don't need more of the same.
Maybe Elementary really is going to crash and burn. But to be honest, if this show fails, it's not going to be because Lucy Liu was cast as Joan Watson. It's going to be the scriptwriting or the production quality or the chemistry between the actors. Would fandom still be making all this fuss if John Watson had been a Caucasian woman? We wouldn't know. But there are plenty of crime procedurals (yes, even American ones!) with a male-female duo that works well together-Bones, The Mentalist, Castle, In Plain Sight, The X-Files, Law & Order: CI, Law & Order: SVU, Lie To Me, Covert Affairs, and doubtless countless other shows I've forgotten about, haven't watched, or have never heard of. Not every male-female pair on television is bound to turn into sexual tension; and if Elementary does, so what? Fandom picks up on the sexual tension between Sherlock and John in Sherlock, and as for the sex appeal factor-the shirt Sherlock first wore in "The Great Game" has its own Urban Dictionary entry, and if I had a penny for every time I saw people reblogging pictures on Tumblr of Benedict Cumberbatch's ass (nude or clothed), I'd probably be up by a dollar by now.
Talking about race or gender is difficult, and talking about the intersection of race and gender is even harder. I don't have a degree in ethnic or gender studies; my only "qualifications" are the race and the gender I was born into. But for an informal, non-academic opinion post like this, maybe that's enough. And it's probably going to be enough for some Asian-American girl somewhere, watching Elementary and seeing a reflection of herself in Lucy Liu's black hair and narrow eyes and thinking to herself, you know what, if Joan Watson can be amazing, so can I.