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Impeccably tailored tweed suits, weighty wool overcoats, and vast, sprawling brick-laden estates that inspire sudden compulsions to sell all your possessions and relocate to the British countryside: These are among the enchanting hallmarks of filmmaker Guy Ritchie’s adaptation of “Young Sherlock.” It’s a new Amazon Prime series based on Andrew Lane’s novel series inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s venerable detective.
Set in a gritty Victorian England, the show imagines what Holmes’s formative years might have looked like before he settled into 221B Baker Street with his flatmate, Dr. Watson. Portrayed by Hero Fiennes Tiffin — who previously appeared in Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) — the incipient and still uncouth Sherlock is plucked from self-inflicted trouble by his watchful older brother, Mycroft (Max Irons), already a neat and trim bureaucrat. Conan Doyle likely would not have envisioned his hero this way, but in Ritchie’s hands Sherlock emerges as something like a British Will Hunting. Like Matt Damon’s swaggering savant, the young Holmes, despite his glaring brilliance, lacks discipline, professional ambition, and any meaningful instinct for self-preservation. After reading a professor’s mathematics textbook overnight, he interrupts the man’s lecture the following morning to correct him, then proceeds to solve a complex chalkboard problem in a scene that borrows too bluntly from Good Will Hunting. Elsewhere, he pursues petty criminal amusements such as pickpocketing purely for the clandestine craft — the very stunt that lands him in jail at the series’ outset.
Though Conan Doyle never clearly elaborated on Holmes’s education, it is no stretch to imagine the Holmes brothers as Oxford men. It is in those august halls that Ritchie stages the opening stretch of the series, bringing his usual directorial flair to the university’s courtyards, corridors, and book-filled interiors. Tiffin and Irons exhibit a palpable chemistry as Sherlock and Mycroft, sharing precisely the sort of fraternal dynamic one imagines between the Holmes brothers: affectionate (calling one another “brother dear”) and intellectually respectful, yet animated by a competitive spirit tantamount to the Space Race, with Mycroft’s composure providing an elegant contrast to Sherlock’s disorderly eccentricities. Both are well cast.
But the real star of Ritchie’s origin story is Sherlock’s infamous future nemesis. We are soon introduced to an irresistibly charming James Moriarty (Dónal Finn), sporting a spry Irish accent and still an innocent inchoate. Finn plays him like a rebellious James Dean, quickly befriending Sherlock, drawing him out of his shell, and urging him to flirt with women, skirt the law, and scorn polite society — not that Sherlock requires much encouragement. A running joke early in the season is that Sherlock, despite his brilliance and tendency to wander into danger, does not know how to fight. Moriarty teaches him how to box and defend himself, among other streetwise lessons. There is something perversely fascinating about the notion that one of literature’s great rivalries might once have resembled an intense youthful friendship. Nearly as intriguing as watching the origins of Sherlock’s deductive gifts is observing the still-boyish Moriarty reveal early signs of sociopathy beneath the charisma, from his detachment from violence to the unnerving ease with which he regards — and dismisses — murder as a situational necessity.
Spanning eight episodes, the season’s overarching narrative revolves around what must be Sherlock’s first real case. Without divulging the cleverly concocted plot, I’ll say the mystery is set in motion when a Chinese princess, Shou’an (Zine Tseng), visiting Oxford with priceless ancient scrolls in tow, is nearly robbed. From that incident unfolds an intricate and multifaceted conspiracy entangling members of the British government, Oxford’s academic elite, and Sherlock’s own family, all operating as warring interests. Overcomplicated plots of this sort are among Ritchie’s specialties and have by now become something of a trademark cliché, but it is hard to fault the formula when executed so well.
Among the many enjoyable aspects of watching Sherlock’s earliest detective work is seeing how Ritchie visualizes his photographic memory. Sherlock will stand in a room with Moriarty and mentally reconstruct prior scenes within that same space, replaying conversations and reassembling visual evidence with startling precision. Conan Doyle described this faculty as Holmes’s “mind palace.” Through sheer concentration, Sherlock can retrieve such minute details as the design on a matchbox left on a side table. It is an effective way of dramatizing his amplified cognition without reducing Holmes’s intellect to the earlier cartoonish riff on Good Will Hunting.
Shou’an, meanwhile, makes for a compelling heroine. Drawn into the broader mystery, she is a gifted martial artist, and her fight sequences are among the series’ highlights. Ritchie has long liked to fuse Sherlock Holmes with hand-to-hand combat, as he did in his Robert Downey Jr. films, reimagining Holmes as a bare-knuckle boxer. Appreciably, Shou’an is not presented as some implausible superwoman who effortlessly flings aside men twice her size. Despite her Mulan-like prowess, she is bested more than once by a towering Turkish henchman (Numan Acar); the series wisely emphasizes that her greatest strengths are cunning, adaptability, and intelligence — qualities central to any serious Sherlock adaptation.
Colin Firth also turns up in a regrettably minor role as Sir Bucephalus Hodge, a facetious and affluent Oxford patron. Firth commands such effortless authority through even mere facial movement that it quickly becomes apparent how formidable a talent he is, especially among the younger cast. He constantly seesaws between affability and menace, making it difficult to tell whose side he is really on. That same sense of instability runs throughout the plot as the mystery widens and loyalties grow harder to parse.
Beneath Ritchie’s reliable filmmaking gimmickry lies an equally compelling thread about fatherhood and family. Sherlock deeply admires his father, Silas (Joseph Fiennes), but as he digs further into the case, he begins to uncover uncomfortable truths about both his family and his own assumptions, so much so that he briefly comes to doubt even his own deductions. Extending beyond the mere solving of a mystery, the central tension becomes deciding whether loyalty ought to reside with blood, the law, or some higher moral principle. That struggle gives Sherlock’s coming-of-age story greater weight. For all the liberties the series takes with his swashbuckling youth, he remains recognizably Holmesian in a sense that he is a moralist, even when morality makes his life more difficult.
Young Moriarty, by contrast, is portrayed as a scholarship student with little money and no real family to speak of. To the show’s credit, it resists the lazy modern temptation to gloss over evil as merely the byproduct of hardship or institutional unfairness — or, in the case of an Irishman, the bitter and corrupting pangs of British oppression. Moriarty’s emerging psychopathy is instead presented as an innate defect of character, making it all the more unsettling because it cannot be neatly rationalized as a social grievance.
Ritchie also retains his flair for music. A nice touch throughout the series is the way the soundtrack adapts to its various settings. As Sherlock’s pursuit carries him from Oxford to London to Paris — where the locals are found indulging in France’s national pastime of violent revolutionary upheaval — and onward to Constantinople, the jukebox shifts accordingly, playing upbeat rock covers performed in the respective local languages. It is a playful stylistic flourish, and an effective one.
Purists will inevitably object that innumerable details are wrong or that the Victorian gentleman of Conan Doyle’s stories could never plausibly have been such a bruised and brash rebel in his youth. But such objections are mostly beside the point. “Young Sherlock” is not attempting some canonical reconstruction of Holmes’s beginnings. It is trying to be a stylish, energetic, and entertaining prehistory of a beloved character, and on those terms it succeeds. Bolstered by strong performances, a beautiful and immersive world, a well-written script, and an engagingly unpredictable mystery, “Young Sherlock” is a polished and thoroughly enjoyable series well worth your attention.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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