Actually, from what I understand, BBC did a brilliant job at translating Sherlock's dysfunction into modern terms. Thing is, while in the original series he comes off as more or less publicly normal for our times, it was completely different in that time. The social standards were much higher, and so what seems fairly normal to us nowadays basically came across then as approximately as bad as BBC's Sherlock comes across now.

I will add the caveat that I am not personally familiar with this, but I have been assured by several knowledgeable friends that this is in fact the case. It really does make a lot of sense, when you consider just the massive differences in public social dynamics over the past century-plus.

(I will also add that I'm only a bit of the way into the first book, so this is pretty much entirely what I've been told by these friends, so I'm not sure that this is actually quite what you meant... but it's something that I'd never understood until I had it explained to me, so thought I might as well pass it along.)

--Fire