Summary
Young Sherlock can get a bit convoluted, but it’s a thoroughly modern origin story for the beloved character that zings with charm and Guy Ritchie’s trademark energy.
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies had their detractors, but there was something about his zinging, slightly smug filmmaking style that suited the character, and it’s very much what breathes life into this adaptation of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels for Prime Video. Delivering weapons-grade snark from all angles and filling Victorian England with a bunch of contemporary anachronisms, Young Sherlock is a show that will definitely annoy people enough to abandon it unfinished. But anyone who’s partial to the Richie way of doing things will find it a rather lovely time, buoyed by an intricate, albeit convoluted mystery, new takes on familiar characters, and a surprisingly personal slant for the famously aloof detective.
We’re in 1871 for this, which puts Sherlock (here played by the rather theatrically named Hero Fiennes Tiffin, seen in Harlan Coben’s Safe) at around 19. He’s in his rebellious phase, but given that pretty much all of his life seems to be his rebellious phase, that doesn’t count for a great deal. Still, his latest hijinks – pickpocketing practice, inspired by Charles Dickens’s Artful Dodger – have landed him in prison, where he’s having one-sided fistfights with the regulars, clearly inspired by the similar scenes from the movies. This Sherlock is a bit pacifistic, mind. Actually throwing punches back comes with age.
Sherlock is in the care of his brother, Mycroft (Max Irons), since their father, Silas (Joseph Fiennes, real-life uncle to Hero, late of The Handmaid’s Tale), is always away on business, and their mother, Cordelia (Natascha McElhone, Halo), has been confined to a mental institution. If you’re wondering whether both of these parental hang-ups might become plot points as things progress, well… wonder no longer.
Mycroft’s bright idea to keep Sherlock out of trouble is to get him a position at Oxford University, though not as a student, as he initially suspects, but as a scout, a lowly housekeeping porter. Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly thrill him, but it does give him an excuse to meet scholarship student – and future nemesis – James Moriarty (a show-stealing Dónal Finn, The Wheel of Time). Moriarty is similarly hyper-intelligent and charismatic, but also much rougher around the edges than Sherlock, mostly evidenced by the fact that he actually hits back.
By chance, Sherlock and Moriarty find themselves as prime suspects in the theft of a set of precious scrolls belonging to Princess Gulun Shou’an (Zine Tseng, 3 Body Problem), who is on campus as the guest of the wonderfully named Sir Bucephalus Hodge (Colin Firth, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth), and have to clear their names by getting to the bottom of the crime. In so doing, they uncover an even more worrying scandal that stretches across the globe, through the corridors of British power, and resonates deeply within their own divided family unit.
Young Sherlock is the rare show that runs for eight episodes and doesn’t feel like it runs for ten. Each is under an hour but proceeds at a breakneck pace, constantly delivering new puzzle pieces to be slotted into the bigger picture, while keeping things loose with frequent action scenes and chases. The dialogue has a lovely rhythm to it, full of sharp one-liners, and Ritchie remains a sure bet for coming up with novel ways of staging Sherlock’s trademark deductive reasoning. The original Arthur Conan Doyle novels are unassailable, of course, but there’s something about this character that is particularly well-suited to an on-screen treatment, at least when it’s done well.
“Done well” here mostly translates to “done entertainingly”, since it’s clear from the outset that the primary mandate of Young Sherlock is to entertain. It’s supposed to be funny and exciting and twisty without getting full of itself or cloying, and it manages to sustain this attitude all the way through while also delivering surprisingly strong characterisation. The dynamic between Sherlock and Moriarty is especially fascinating, resisting the easy temptation to make Moriarty a villain even at this point, and instead allowing their differences in experience and perspective to calcify into divergent priorities as the series goes on. It’s a very natural way of colouring the relationship Sherlock has with his most longstanding and dangerous nemesis, and is helped along by Finn’s performance, which is the show’s best by a mile.
It sticks the landing, too, managing – somehow; it doesn’t always seem like it’s going to get there – to weave its plot into a wide-ranging family tapestry that builds to a satisfying climax but also leaves plenty of meat on the bone for a sequel that feels as inevitable as it does enticing. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes didn’t need an origin story, but for once, I’m glad he got one. Even more shockingly, I’m also hoping we haven’t seen the whole of it just yet.
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