Watson season two review – a Sherlock Holmes spinoff full of naughty wit

It is like House meets Elementary for this show about the sidekick of Conan Doyle's detective, who investigates a different medical mystery each week – when he isn't having tastefully lit horizontal time Go to 221B Baker Street and the Sherlock Holmes fans you meet there will be American, not British – and while the BBC’s Sherlock might be the most famous Holmes revival on TV this century, the US has us beat when it comes to volume. Stateside telly responded to Sherlockmania with Elementary, which relocated Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes to New York and made Watson and Moriarty female, but was in many ways a more faithful sleuthfest than the overblown Benedict Cumberbatch show and ran for scores more episodes. Long before that, the biggest drama in the world was House, which was set in a hospital but featured a mercurial genius solving baffling mysteries – once the House-Home-Holmes penny dropped, you knew you were watching Sherlock in disguise. Watson is the latest attempt by US network television to keep the Conan Doyle canon firing, and it’s a straight cross between House and Elementary. Morris Chestnut is Dr John Watson, who is an American practising medicine in present-day Pittsburgh, but is also a war veteran who, when the show aired its first season last year, had just finished a stint cracking crimes in London with Sherlock Holmes. Showrunner Craig Sweeny, formerly a writer/producer on Elementary, gave his new Watson a litter of eager doctor pups who, like the gang who used to trail around behind Dr House, were always a step behind their boss when it came to working out which arcane condition was about to kill that week’s patient. Watson aired on Sky Witness and is available on NOW in the UK, and Paramount in Australia. Continue reading...

By Jack Seale