Summary
Watson builds a relatively trite medical procedural around the Sherlock name in Episode 1. It’s too early to tell what this show might offer down the line, but early evidence isn’t promising.
At one point in the Watson premiere, Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut, seen most recently in Reasonable Doubt) echoes one of Sherlock Holmes’s famous quotes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” This CBS medical procedural has eliminated Holmes himself, and what remains is, it turns out, rather average, at least as far as Episode 1 is concerned.
CBS is hoping the Sherlock well hasn’t run dry after Elementary, but crucially that show had Holmes in it. The premiere of Watson opens with his apparent demise after a tumble down a waterfall in pursuit of James Moriarty (who else?). Shinwell Johnson (Tulsa King’s Richie Coster) informs Watson that Holmes has snuffed it, though with that guy I suppose you can never tell. Expect a late-season reveal where it’s implied otherwise.
In the meantime, Watson has been bequeathed a swanky diagnostic medical clinic in Pittsburgh paid for by Holmes’s apparently substantial estate, and Shinwell has been hired and pre-paid as a kind of thuggish aide in the endeavor. Six months later, Watson has hired a who’s-who of medical standouts who also happen to double as experiments for Watson’s own personal interests in genetic medicine: Dr. Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann) was born in poor, rural China and adopted into a wealthy suburb in America, twin brothers Dr. Stephens and Dr. Adam Croft (Peter Mark Kendall) are a living experiment in nature versus nurture, and Dr. Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow, The Night Agent), fabricated a bunch of stuff on her application, which is treated as a bit of a reveal later on.
Watson himself is ostensibly doing well mentally and physically – whatever Morris Chestnut’s diet and exercise routine is, I need to get on it ASAP – but clearly hasn’t gotten over what happened with Moriarty, whom he recalls has syndactyly, a condition in which two or more fingers or toes are fused together (fingers, in his case, so when he turns his hands down it looks like he’s making an “M” sign like a comic-book supervillain. Jury’s still out on the toes.)
The case of the week in Watson Episode 1 involves Erica, a pregnant woman who fears she might have FFI, or Fatal Familial Insomnia, a hereditary condition that I guess causes you to stay awake until you die. She’s worried that she’ll expire before she’s able to give birth to her child, so Watson’s team is tasked with keeping her alive long enough to deliver the child, but that objective quickly pivots into deducing what’s really up with her when they suspect she doesn’t actually have FFI.
Morris Chestnut in Watson | Image via CBS
Dr. Mary Morse (Rochelle Aytes), the facility’s medical director and, conveniently for the sake of the show’s drama, Watson’s ex-wife, is fuming to discover that Watson has lied to Erica about a cutting-edge new diagnostic determining that she doesn’t have FFI after all, which allows her to settle into a fitful sleep of relief. But she wakes up blind and unable to smile.
It was at this point in the Watson premiere that I kind of lost track of the medical stuff. There’s a lot of jargon in this, even by medical show standards, and Brilliant Minds and The Pitt have set a high standard recently for how not to let this kind of dialogue overwhelm the drama. The adjacency to Sherlock Holmes seems to give everyone a desperate, pathological desire to be the smartest person in the room, so they just spout off gobbledygook theories at every opportunity.
This leads to a flurry of plot developments involving Erica, and her cousin Autumn who seems to be sick from the same thing. Autumn turns out to have songbird fever, a form of salmonellosis caused by cats carrying dirty birds around, but Erica doesn’t have that. However, some common shared traits reveal they’re half-sisters and share the same genetic disorder that prevents the body from recycling biotin, which means a vitamin B supplement will help, as long Erica survives emergency surgery because of some abscesses near her liver which cause her to convulse and foam at the mouth. It’s like Watson simply cannot be content with a baseline level of suffering. Everything has to compound two or three times before it’s deemed serious enough to build an episode around.
The most interesting part of Watson Episode 1 occurs at the very end and has nothing to do with medicine. We see Shinwell clandestinely meeting up with a man who turns out to be Moriarty (Randall Park – The Interview; Blockbuster; Shortcomings), handing him a case of “samples” that he has apparently requested. Now, I assume Shinwell is doing this reluctantly, but if that’s the case, what does the villain have on him? His implication that he’ll always be watching implies that he has caught Shinwell in some kind of compromising act and is now blackmailing him, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Either way, it’s a decent enough climax to an otherwise flawed procedural premiere coasting on the name appeal of its protagonist more than anything else. It’s too early to judge too harshly, but the initial evidence doesn’t seem especially promising.
