Six years after CBS’ Sherlock Holmes-related series Elementary ended, another series using Holmes mythology — created by someone who was on Elementary‘s writing staff — is debuting. This time, Dr. John Watson is the main character, running a clinic in the wake of Holmes’ death. What do the doctors who work in this clinic do? They solve medical mysteries, of course.
WATSON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Through the clouds, we see a waterfall. “SWITZERLAND. RICHENBACH FALLS.”
The Gist: This is where Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) comes upon his friend and mentor, Sherlock Holmes fighting his archnemesis, James Moriarty. When the two plunge over the falls, locked in combat, Watson dives in after them.
After struggling to find Holmes, Watson wakes in a hospital, where he’s being visited by loyal aide Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster). He tells Watson he’s had a traumatic brain injury, and that, sadly, Holmes did not make it out of the falls alive. Shinwell tells Watson that Holmes has left him money and instructions to set up a clinic — the Holmes Institute — which Watson decides to create in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
Six months later, the clinic is up and running, with Shinwell helping Watson run the place. The doctors he hired — neurologist Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), immunology specialist Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann) and infectious disease specialists Stephens Croft and Adam Croft (both played by Peter Mark Kendall) — are the best doctors in their fields, but they all have interesting factors about them.
The Croft brothers are identical twins with opposing personalities; Lubbock was adopted from China by a family in Dallas; and Derian is a workaholic who doesn’t let anyone in. Derian checks on Watson’s condition; he insists he’s fine, but constantly has flashbacks to the incident at the falls.
When tricky cases at the local hospital come in, the medical director, Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes) — who also happens to be Watson’s ex-wife — brings the clinic in. In this case, a pregnant woman who thinks she has Fatal Familial Insomnia, and hasn’t slept for days. She wants to make sure she’s alive long enough to give birth. But Watson isn’t so sure that it’s FFI, despite the woman’s feeling that the condition is what killed her father and other members of her family.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Watson is House crossed with Elementary. Despite the fact that both Watson and Elementary share characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, and Watson‘s creator, Craig Sweeny, wrote for Elementary, the two shows do not take place in the same universe.
Our Take: When we were watching the pilot for Watson, we struggled to figure out just what would make this show much different from a medical mystery series like House or any of the ones that came after it. The Holmesian elements of the story feel like they’re forced in at times, generally via Watson’s PTSD and some of the connections Shinwell has that help Watson and his staff solve cases.
If the purpose was to continue to mine Holmes IP for characters and storylines, we’re not quite sure if that’s the best use of Sweeny and his staff’s time. Where they need to concentrate is on the members of Watson’s staff, who right now feel more like one-dimensional caricatures than actual characters. They’re defined by their quirks and nothing else.
It feels like, for instance, both Croft brothers are in scenes just to show Kendall’s acting range and the technology involved in having the same actor share scenes as different characters. Orphan Black did this over a decade ago, so it’s no longer novel and doesn’t need to be showcased. Schlingmann is forced to maintain a bad Texas accent for the life of the show just because Sweeny and company wanted her to be a Chinese woman who grew up in Dallas. Why not have her grow up in New Jersey, or Iowa, or someplace less obviously “different” from where she was born?
Then we get the cases. The first episode’s case careens from one onscure condition to the next, with different family members we barely know falling victim to unrelated illnesses. The solution ended up being a bit anticlimactic, but at the very least we got an idea of what the show could be if it went away from Holmsian mythology and just concentrated on the medical mysteries.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: On the Duquesne Incline, Shinwell meets up with someone who is very interested in what Watson is doing.
Sleeper Star: We’re going to talk about that person Shinwell met on the Incline for a second. We threw up our hands when we saw that person, not because we don’t like the actor who is in the role, but we’re not sure that this particular actor can pull the role off, especially given who’s played the role in the recent past.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Stephens gets rightfully insulted that Watson calls him “Stephen-zzz,” Watson replies, “I don’t like it; it sounds like there’s more than one Stephen here.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. Watson jams Holmesian mythology, quirky doctors, and complex medical mysteries into stories that can’t really handle all three at once, and it shows in how none of it feels well thought-out.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
