Watson Is More Faithful to Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle Than You Think

This Watson article contains spoilers.

If you’ve heard anything at all about the new CBS medical-mystery series Watson, it’s probably that it’s similar to another Sherlock Holmes-inspired medical series, House. But comparing Watson to House is superficial at best because turning a Sherlock Holmes premise into a medical drama starring a quirky doctor isn’t original to that famous show, either. That concept actually goes all the way back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. What makes Watson such an interesting take on these characters is that it fuses the fiction of the Holmes stories with Doyle’s real biography.

Created by Craig Sweeney, who also wrote many episodes of Elementary (as well as the recent Star Trek misfire Section 31), Watson initially seems like a departure from the canon as established by Doyle. Here, Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) witnesses Holmes apparently die at the Reichenbach Falls, promptly inherits a fortune from Holmes’ will, and then sets up a super clinic in Pittsburgh staffed by various medical geniuses. The stated purpose of this clinic is fuzzy, but there’s certainly a Star Trek-ish feel to the gang: brilliant twin brothers Stephens Croft and Adam Croft (Peter Mark Kendall), eccentric neurologist Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), and Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann), an immunologist with a touch of Southern charm.

Rounding out the gang is Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), a former thug who eventually found himself in the employ of Sherlock Holmes. The name “Shinwell Johnson” comes from a vaguely similar character from the original Doyle short story “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” and the show’s nods to the larger Holmes canon don’t end there. Watson quotes the famous Holmes maxim in the pilot episode, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” and, by the end of the same episode, a new version of Moriarty is revealed. 

For those who loved Sherlock or Elementary, all these elements will seem vaguely familiar, a contemporary Holmes world, but now with references to the 2020s rather than the 2010s. Of course, the biggest difference here is that Watson is a Sherlock Holmes show without Sherlock. But this wrinkle doesn’t make Watson unfaithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle—instead, it take the entire Holmes phenomenon back to its real-life roots.

Before he became an author, Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical student. Somewhat famously, one of his teachers was an eccentric guy by the name of Dr. Joseph Bell, “Joe” to his friends. According to historical accounts, Bell physically looked nothing like his fictional cipher, Sherlock Holmes, but his powers of deduction—noticing certain types of mud on people’s shoes—inspired Doyle in a myriad of ways. 

Later, when he became a practicing doctor himself, Doyle spent his free time writing. Eventually, this led to the publication of A Study in Scarlet in 1887. The birth of Holmes and Watson in that book saw Doyle essentially split his persona into two: both Holmes and Watson represented aspects of the writer but also a kind of hyper-fictionalized version of his own biography. Holmes, as a stand-in for Bell, was Doyle’s inner teacher, the part of him that retained Bell’s teachings and applied them not just to medicine but to crime fiction. Meanwhile, Watson was a slightly more heroic version of Doyle the doctor.

I’m not the first person to make this observation about how Doyle split sides of himself to create Holmes and Watson, nor is this practice altogether uncommon with great writers who created iconic duos. Nichelle Nichols pointed out in her 1995 memoir Beyond Uhura that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry put facets of himself into both Kirk and Spock, which, she noted, were then reconstituted into one character: Jean-Luc Picard. While that famous starship captain is just one artistic descendent of Sherlock Holmes, consolidating too much intellectual power in one hero can make for too perfect (read: dull) of a protagonist in the wrong hands. Doyle wisely gave Holmes his Watson, and it’s why the TV series Watson gives the good doctor his team of super-physicians.

Yes, structurally, this makes the TV series appear more conventional—perhaps even trying to compete with the CSIs of the world—but the power of the Holmes canon is that it’s not just about one guy showing off. It’s about a partnership between two minds: Holmes the genius detective and Watson the writer who makes the impossible real. When Den of Geek spoke to Jude Law about Skeleton Crew last year, year, we got a second to chat some Doyle. That former Watson reminded us that the power of the Holmes stories rests with that character: “It’s a detail people forget,” Law said. “That the stories are being told by him.”

The series Watson may not be perfect. But it does understand this detail. The story of Sherlock Holmes has always been the story of Dr. Watson, too. Whether or not he’s a reliable narrator is part of the game. And with this series, the game may seem different, but it’s still very much afoot.

Watson airs on CBS and streams on Paramount+.

The post Watson Is More Faithful to Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle Than You Think appeared first on Den of Geek.