"Sherlock" Review: The Modern Update That Actually Worked

Yet another adaptation of the world's most famous detective. This time, the creators moved him into the present day, which sounds like the sort of idea pitched at three in the morning and abandoned by lunch. But it worked.

Why Moving Him Forward Was the Right Call

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss came up with this on the train between London and Cardiff while they were both working on "Doctor Who," which is a suitably unglamorous origin for something this good.

Gatiss described the aim as treating modern London the way period adaptations treat Victorian London, with the same affection for the city itself. That is the key to the whole thing. The update is not a gimmick laid over the stories; it is a way of getting back to what made them work in the first place. Holmes in 1890 was a man using brand new forensic methods nobody else understood. Putting him in 2010 with a smartphone and a website is closer to the original spirit than another round of hansom cabs and gaslight.

And the show is not shy about the swap. Text messages appear on screen instead of being read aloud. The blog replaces the published casebook. Watson comes back wounded from Afghanistan, which required changing nothing at all.

The Casting

Benedict Cumberbatch is the reason this version sticks. His Sherlock is rude, gleeful, and very difficult to be around, and his charisma keeps it from being merely unpleasant. You watch him because he is enjoying himself.

Martin Freeman is doing the harder, less-noticed job. Watson has to be the person who finds Sherlock extraordinary so that we do too, while remaining a competent soldier and doctor in his own right rather than a walking reaction shot. Freeman gets that balance exactly.

Then there is Andrew Scott's Moriarty, who arrives at the end of the first season and reshapes the show around himself. Most screen Moriartys play cold, controlled, professorial. Scott plays him as unstable and delighted, a man who is genuinely having fun, and it is far more frightening. It should not work as well as it does.

The supporting bench is deep in the same way. Gatiss himself plays Mycroft, Una Stubbs makes Mrs Hudson far more than a landlady, and Louise Brealey's Molly Hooper is an invention of the show that earned her place completely.

Willing to Break the Canon

The creators were not precious about the source, and the show is much better for it.

They kept what serves the story and discarded the rest. Some cases follow Conan Doyle closely; others take a title and a premise and go somewhere entirely new. Characters who barely exist on the page get real arcs. Plot points fans knew by heart get inverted specifically because the audience knew them by heart.

The clearest example of the confidence involved is the 2016 special, which drops the modern setting altogether and plays the whole thing in Victorian dress. A show built on the idea of updating Holmes spent ninety minutes doing the opposite, purely because it could.

How It Got Made

There is a version of this show almost nobody has seen.

The original pilot was shot in early 2009, ran sixty minutes, and Coky Giedroyc directed it. The BBC watched it and asked for something bigger: ninety-minute episodes instead of sixty. So they remade "A Study in Pink" almost entirely, with Paul McGuigan directing, adding thirty minutes of new material, and adding Mycroft to the story.

It aired on 25 July 2010 and the format held for the rest of the run: four seasons of three feature-length episodes each, plus the Victorian special, thirteen in total, finishing in January 2017. Each season split its three episodes between Moffat, Gatiss and Steve Thompson, which is part of why the tone stays coherent across seven years with such long gaps between them.

In Defence of Seasons 3 and 4

Plenty of people will tell you the show fell off after the first two seasons. I don't agree, and I think season 4, in particular, gets treated unfairly.

The most common complaint is about Eurus Holmes, the secret third sibling, and I want to be straight about the terms of the defence. She is not in Conan Doyle. There is no Holmes sister anywhere in the sixty stories, and the only thread back to the source is her name: Eurus is the Greek east wind, and the east wind is what Holmes invokes in "His Last Bow" as the thing about to sweep across the country.

But being an invention is not a mark against her, and it cannot be if you liked the first two seasons. This show built its reputation on cutting loose from the source material. That is what I was praising two seasons ago. Eurus is simply the furthest that instinct ever went, and it is not a consistent position to applaud the early seasons for their small departures and then condemn the last one for taking the biggest. Season 4 also gives you Culverton Smith, who comes straight out of "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" from 1913, with Moffat calling him the darkest villain the show had used. The invented material and the faithful material are sitting in the same three episodes.

I also liked where the tone went. The early run is a detective story with a comic streak. The later seasons are heavier, more concerned with what this friendship costs both men and what Sherlock actually is underneath the performance. That shift gave the show somewhere to go. A series that stayed permanently in the register of season 1 would have run out of road.

The Verdict

Four seasons, held at the same level throughout, which is a credit to everyone who wrote and directed it.

The update could have been a stunt. Instead, it produced the definitive screen Holmes of this era and a Moriarty nobody has beaten since. Start at "A Study in Pink" and keep going. It is worth the whole run, including the later seasons.