Young Sherlock: The Case of the Missing Genius

Much of my childhood, weekend mornings in particular, was spent curled up on the couch with a mystery novel. The Famous Five, Nancy Drew, Murder Most Unladylike, Agatha Christie — I worked my way through all of them. When I finally got to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I understood why he held the title of the greatest detective of all time. The others were clever, but Holmes was on a different level entirely. So, when Prime Video announced an origin series exploring who he was before Baker Street, I was excited. Here was a chance to see how someone could have possibly evolved into the character we all know and love.

Created by Matthew Parkhill and developed with Guy Ritchie, Young Sherlock follows a 19-year-old Holmes stumbling into his first murder case at Oxford, his talent mostly buried under bad decisions and worse luck. Through the eight episodes, we watch a twisted conspiracy tying a tragedy that has haunted Holmes’s family for years to the massacre of an entire Chinese village slowly unravel. The plot, to its credit, is genuinely gripping, and Ritchie’s dynamic visual style gives it all a propulsive momentum that carries you through the weaker stretches — though that style occasionally veers into the absurd, namely a soundtrack including Radiohead and Black Sabbath blaring over the cobblestones of Victorian England. 

The most interesting choice, by far, is making the infamous James Moriarty Sherlock’s closest friend, and something of a mentor, rather than his archnemesis. Immediately, they clock each other as the only two people in the room sharp enough to keep up with one another and form a unique relationship. Dónal Finn is exceptional in the role of Moriarty, skillfully portraying subtle hints of danger underneath his roguish charm. If anything, he often outshines Sherlock himself. Their shared scenes carry the shadow of what we know must come, and by the finale, the first cracks begin to show between them. It’s exactly the kind of dramatic irony that prequels do best.

 Despite all this, the series left me with a nagging dissatisfaction. Hero Fiennes Tiffin delivers a solid performance, yet he fundamentally lacks what makes Sherlock Sherlock. That cold, almost inhuman precision, that sense of a mind running several steps ahead of everyone else in the room, is simply absent. In Silver Blaze, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock identifies the culprit merely from a dog that didn’t bark. The BBC series brought that brilliance to life through its rapid-fire visualisations of his extraordinary thought process. While Young Sherlock does attempt something similar by letting Holmes step inside his memory of crime scenes to inspect them — like when he examines a broken window — those moments rarely feel truly genius in the same way.

Instead, what we get is a hobbyist pickpocket who punches his way through problems. For a character defined by his intellect, there is a surprising amount of fistfights and a surprising lack of genuine deduction. I get that this is meant to be an unpolished, teenage Holmes; I wasn’t expecting him to be able to innately differentiate 140 types of tobacco ash. But an origin story still needs to plant the seeds of who a person will become. 

Take Young Sheldon (yes, I’ve been tripped up by the similarity of the two titles multiple times). Even when certain details don’t perfectly align with The Big Bang Theory, kid Sheldon’s complete lack of hesitation in correcting teachers and his need to impose rigid structure onto even the most casual aspects of daily life feel unmistakably like his adult counterpart.

Young Sherlock, on the other hand, just doesn’t achieve that.

At the end of the day, you are watching an entertaining show where an entertaining young man solves a mystery. You are not, particularly, watching the making of a legend. For all its style and intrigue, it never quite captures the spark that defines Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps I’m too anchored by Cumberbatch’s acting and Conan Doyle’s novels to fully appreciate Ritchie’s interpretation of the character, and an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes suggests I may well be in the minority, but I just wasn’t convinced. 

With a second season already in production, there’s still time for the series to grow into the story it’s promising to tell. I’m willing to keep watching to find out. For now, though, I can’t say it has earned its name.