The Sherlock Holmes Canon Is Mostly Made Up Anyway, So 'Young Sherlock' Might As Well Have Fun With It

There’s so little backstory on Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle canon that adaptations have a ton of freedom to invent their own mythology. Doyle never said that Sherlock had a sister, for instance, but he didn’t say he didn’t have one, either. Most of what we think we know about Moriarty, meanwhile, comes from adaptations. Most of what we know about most of the characters comes from the adaptations.

Essentially, that creates a blank canvas upon which Guy Ritchie can paint in Prime Video’s Young Sherlock, and while I’d peg the end product at a solid B+, the Holmes mythology that Ritchie and Peter Harness conjure up is surprisingly rich and fun. In this iteration, Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty begin as best friends who meet at Oxford, where Holmes is expelled after being accused of murder and Moriarty loses his scholarship largely by virtue of his association with Holmes.

As played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Dónal Finn, they’re a genuinely fun duo, working a case that unfolds across all eight episodes and involves a Chinese princess, Princess Gulun Shou’an (Zine Tseng), a deadly toxin, and a series of clever, surprising connections to the entire Holmes family — his father, Silas (played by Hero’s real-life father, Joseph Fiennes), his mother, Cordelia (Natascha McElhone), who has been committed to an asylum, and Mycroft, here a member of the foreign service (played by Max Irons, son of Jeremy — the production is nepo-heavy).

Crucially, the case also circles back to the mysterious death of Sherlock’s sister, Beatrice, years earlier — the event that precipitated Cordelia’s confinement and Silas’s abandonment of his family. Once the threads surrounding Princess Gulun Shou’an are untangled, it’s Silas Holmes’s missing years that end up carrying the most weight. It’s a full family affair, plus Moriarty, who proves Sherlock’s equal as an investigator. The seeds of their eventual rivalry are planted here, too, and the origin story involves some influential connections you won’t see coming.

I’m reluctant to say much more about the plot, lest I spoil the more surprising dynamics at play. There’s treachery, a few well-placed twists, and naturally a number of cheeky nods to Doyle’s source material scattered throughout.

It’s also unmistakably a Guy Ritchie production: British, stylish, briskly paced, and action-forward. Ritchie is hardly a stranger to this world — he directed both Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films — and like those movies, Young Sherlock operates essentially as an action buddy comedy. (Conspicuously absent here, for the record, is Doctor Watson.)

What Young Sherlock lacks, however, is a fully realized, identifiable Sherlock. That’s not entirely a criticism — this Holmes is only 19, and the limitation isn’t Fiennes’ fault. But there’s precious little actual deduction involved, and what deduction does appear is fairly rudimentary. The show skews a bit YA, which isn’t a knock exactly, but I wish Ritchie and Harness had invested as much energy in the mechanics of the mystery as they did in the Holmesian mythology surrounding it.

That said, I had a genuinely good time with it. I am not a Doyle purist — I came to be entertained, not to audit the canon — so I was more than happy to lean into the character reimaginings. And I particularly appreciated that one of the most recognizable faces in the cast turns out to be, essentially, an elaborately staged red herring who checks out somewhere around the halfway point. It’s the kind of swing that a lesser show wouldn’t dare take, and the fact that Young Sherlock commits to it so fully is, perhaps, the best evidence that Ritchie and Harness know exactly what kind of show they’re making — and are having a hell of a time making it.