Young Sherlock: Season 1

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There are always some things that come with a Guy Ritchie joint. Shit gets hectic. And shit gets more than a little confusing. Mostly because of the first thing. And while this made for a lot of fun in his earliest films like Snatch and RocknRolla, eight long of episodes trying to follow the ADD that pulses through his directing style and pacing of his narrative becomes just a bit too much. Too many characters in too many places sliding in slo-mo on their knees across too many floors and talking in too many impenetrable accents. I got my first taste of this TV version in 2024’s The Gentlemen, which had some similar beats and his signature wacky style. I imagine the fact he has some co-conspirators in this effort tamed some of his wilder instincts — and certainly downplayed some of the more R-rated aspects — but there was still a lot of his signature style to go around. Which, as should be clear at this point, was sometimes a positive, but often a drawback.

Here’s the thing. If you’re goin to have a series called Young Sherlock, shouldn’t the person playing that role actually be young? Like, would you cast John Mulaney to play Sheldon in Young Sheldon? You would not. So why did the show’s creators cast 28-year-old Hero Fiennes Tiffin to play 19-year-old Sherlock? And then surround him with 30-year-old Dónal Finn to play similarly-aged James Moriarty. The man looks like he’s on at least his second mortgage. But, in the most egregious move, they cast 40-year-old Max Irons as Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft. Who is supposed to be 26. C’mon, man. It’s just that we’re supposed to be impressed by this young man who comes up with all these great investigative ta-das and, instead, we’re watching a grown-ass adult man solve shit that we’d expect a grown-ass man to solve. I’d say Hero there could pull off 25, maybe. But, even at 30, Finn looks like he’s at least 35 and hardly a teenager. It’s absurd and took me out of it from jump. It’s Steve and Andrea from 90210 all over again.

Casting blunders aside, I’m not really sure we needed this series. We had a great show called Sherlock and a great Sherlock in Benedict Cumberbatch. And a really disconcerting 1985 film called Young Sherlock Holmes that I saw in the theater twice. Mostly because it was so disconcerting. This series gives us Sherlock’s backstory, sure, but in doing so also tried to solve a mystery as evidence of his powers as a young nobody. And therein lies the main issue. The writing and execution just doesn’t stand up to the past Sherlock material. Or even the Sherlock-like material. You know the stuff. He sees connections we would never see. He sniffs things. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of things that help him puzzle out solutions where there seem to be none. But — and here’s the rub — we have to hear him make these summaries and suppositions and be able to look back be like “Ah, now I see it.” Or, at least, to be dazzled by the whole thing. Nothing here is dazzling in terms of the Sherlockiness. So, instead of depending on wowing us with the detective work, the shows tries a bunch of action set pieces and physical humor to maybe distract us from the weakness of the writing and some of the weaker performances. Hero is fine. He’s just no Benedict. Not even close.

So, what is Sherlock’s trauma? Turns out it’s a dead sister. One who drowned as a child, sending his mother into an emotional spiral that started and ended with her being institutionalized. His mother, Cordelia, who is played by a wonderful Natascha McElhone. At which point his father, Silas (played by his actual uncle, Joseph Fiennes), maybe takes off. Or doesn’t take off? I’m honestly not sure because the timelines in this show are all f’d. It seems that Sherlock and his father have been estranged for some time, but considering he’s only 19 and his mother was in a hospital for what we have to believe is going on 15 years, who raised him? Honestly, I’m not sure. All of this gets even more convoluted — and this is a spoiler, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know how one item resolves — when his “dead” sister, Beatrice (Holly Cattle), shows back up. Even though she’s actually been there all along, hiding in plain sight as an assistant to Colin Firth. Yet, neither Sherlock nor Mycroft recognize their own sister. And, while my math may be a tad off, we know she’s the younger sister of Sherlock and she was at least several years younger than him when she “died,” based on the flashbacks we see. Making her conservatively about sixteen in the show. Or thereabouts. I’m not even going to mention that Holly Cattle is 28 and looks and acts not even remotely 16, and at one point sleeps with Moriarty. I’m not sure what the age of consent was back in 1870s England, but that’s pushing it. Creepy and also a bit unforgivable in terms of plotting and human decency.

I haven’t delved into the actual plot, which involves China and some nerve agent and a bunch of professors and assassins and a couple things I didn’t really follow. But those are all the aforementioned “mysteries” that I mentioned that the writers really threw a bunch of chaff into the air to explain. Because the real gist was getting to the backstory. And while, taken as a whole, the backstory can be somewhat clarifying, the individual parts are nonsensical. Which is pretty ironic in a series that is supposed to be all about solid clues coming together to show us a clear picture of the truth. It’s a series that has some fun spots, but is a bit self-defeating and sometimes more of a drag than it needed to be. Perhaps they’ll course correct in season two now that we have a decent idea of why Sherlock is how he is, but they’ll really need to take a look at how to tighten this thing up and deliver a mystery we might actually care about at the end of the day.