When you create a character as perfect as Sherlock Holmes, as Arthur Conan Doyle did in 1887 — and not just a character but a whole situation, with a sidekick chronicler, Dr. Watson, a housekeeper and an address — you give the world an armature to build on, a template to play off. And so the world has built and played, across countless adaptations, pastiches, reimaginings, animations and updates. There may be no characters in English literature more widely recognized and well understood.
Television has done Holmes straight — the four period series starring Jeremy Brett, which ran from 1984 to 1994 and adapted 43 of 60 Holmes stories — and has brought the characters into the 21st century. Steven Moffat’s contemporary “Sherlock” (2010-17), with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson, respectively, paid homage to the original stories more than it adapted them. “House” (2004-12), with Hugh Laurie, cast the master detective as a doctor in a medical drama; references to the original stories were obvious, explicit and part of the fun. And “Elementary,” which aired on CBS from 2012 to 2019, pictured Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) as a recovering drug addict attached to the NYPD, with Watson (Lucy Liu), a former surgeon, hired to keep him sober.
CBS has gone back to that well now with “Watson,” premiering Sunday after the AFC championship game. Created by Craig Sweeny, who wrote for “Elementary,” “Watson” moves Holmes’ almost-as-famous physician friend into the spotlight. And what we get is, more or less, a warmer, fuzzier version of “House.” The basics are substantially the same — John Watson (Morris Chestnut), a clinical geneticist, leads a team of young doctors sleuthing their way to the heart of difficult cases, as he fences with an exasperated superior who, in this case, is Watson’s almost ex-wife, Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes).
We meet him at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, running through the woods, shouting “Holmes!” as gunshots explode in the distance. Even those moderately familiar with the canon will know that this is where Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, plunged to their apparent deaths in Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”; but here Watson jumps in after them. He awakens in a Swiss hospital sporting “a traumatic brain injury” and some memory loss, attended by an animated East End Londoner named Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster) — “the most ridiculous name,” says Watson, who doesn’t remember it — a minor, somewhat criminal character pulled from “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and, in this telling, a sort of third partner in the Holmes gang.
Ritchie Coster, left, as Shinwell Johnson and Morris Chestnut as Dr. John Watson.
(Colin Bentley / CBS)
Holmes, Johnson tells Watson once he has got some of his wits back, was apparently “loaded” (“had the bees and honey to look after us both,” he says, using Cockney slang for money) and has funded a clinic for Watson to run, with a salary for Johnson to work as his aide. Six months later, we are in Pittsburgh and the Holmes Clinic is up and running, with 200 applications coming in a day. Sweeney has loaded his doctor with lots of extra business: He’s still recovering from his fall, treating himself with surreptitiously acquired drugs, while working to cure his patients in sometimes unorthodox, unethical or illegal ways; he’s dragging his feet on a divorce from Mary, who tired of him running off to London to play detective whenever Holmes called. And it is soon revealed — to us, not to him — that Moriarty lives, and has compromised Johnson in some way the series does not reveal in the five episodes out for review.
Like Gregory House, Watson has his crew of variably eager young experts slash students slash acolytes, each with a specialty. Identical twins Stephens and Adam Croft (both played by Peter Mark Kendall, quite seamlessly) are oh so far apart in character: Stephens is a study bug with no social life, the ant to Adam’s easygoing grasshopper. (He’s also dating Adam’s ex.) Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann), adopted from China by rich Texans, sports a wide Southern accent. They are there, Adam suggests, as examples of nature versus nurture: “Watson thinks the whole world is an experiment in genetic medicine; we’re just part of it.” And then there’s Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), who is also acting as Holmes’ neurologist, whom Adam classes as “a mystery.”
“We’re doctors and we’re detectives,” Watson tells them. “Mysteries are what we do.” There are throwaway references to the Baker Street Irregulars and the Red-Headed League. Watson pronounces Holmes’ famous dictum that once you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is the truth; he must say it a lot, given the kids’ reaction.
“Watson” has all the hallmarks of a CBS procedural. The network has a taste and a talent for a kind of light serious entertainment in which a likable cast of sometimes difficult characters solve a problem in an hour, while other, darker events percolate underneath. These reliably entertaining shows — “Matlock” and “Elsbeth” and “NCIS Wherever,” also running now — can generate a good bit of tension while remaining pleasant on the whole, and though superficially deep can sometimes elicit a real emotional response. There’s nothing like a life-and-death situation turning out “life” to moisten one’s eyes, especially if you or a loved one has spent any time in the medical system, or feared the possibility.
