The Game is Afoot, but “Watson” Isn’t

More like Reichenbach Fall-ing Off

I didn’t grow up with cable television. We had limited screen time, so we usually watched whatever VHS or DVDs we owned, or rented the latest movies from Redbox. It wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I started watching serialized television. I borrowed Doctor Who DVDs from my local library and my sister’s Netflix account to watch Downton Abbey. I remember curling up next to my parents on the couch for the fourth season of BBC Sherlock, which was the only show I ever saw my parents get really invested in. They even took me to the movie theater to see the special showing of The Abominable Bride. Long story short, I wasn’t really exposed to the hours of mindless slop that fills network television nowadays. It’s made me pretty picky when it comes to what I want to watch.

My parents and I have been chasing the high that BBC’s adaptation gave us all those years ago; they’ve attempted to fill the Cumberbatch shaped void with other British detective shows like Endeavor and Elementary, but none have scratched the itch quite the same. I plunged headfirst into trying different kinds of shows from Jane the Virgin to The Clone Wars to Abbott Elementary. Long have I wished for a season five revival of Sherlock, but the two stars’ busy schedules and the less-than-stellar reception of season four has effectively ended my hopes and dreams for my boys to come back.

During a recent Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills playoff game ads promoting the new show Watson kept playing. I thought it was an interesting premise: after Sherlock Holmes is killed, Watson starts a new medical practice in the States. My husband suggested keeping it on the channel and watching the pilot episode. It’s inspired by Sherlock, after all, and the Elementary team worked on it. How bad could it be?

Reader, it can be bad.

A Scandal in my Screen-ia

After plunging over a waterfall chasing Sherlock Holmes, Morris Chestnut’s titular character wakes up in a hospital bed to the news that his friend met a watery demise but left him a large sum of money to start a new medical practice. This version of Watson is an American who starts his newly funded practice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The episode follows Watson and his team of doctors who work on special medical cases; the first is a pregnant woman who hasn’t slept in a week. The medical case takes a backseat as the show gives explicit exposition for the team of doctors Watson hired at his clinic: an angry looking neurologist, twins who are infectious disease and functional medicine specialists respectively, and a rheumatology and immunology specialist. To further complicate matters, Watson’s ex-wife Mary Morstan also appears as a surgeon and the medical director of the clinic. The last character is arguably the most important but the least explained: Shinwell Johnson is a British gentleman with convenient connections that help the plot move along.

It is common knowledge that pilot episodes are usually a bit rough, and this one is not an exception. At certain points the dialogue was hard to follow and the exposition was too obvious. The acting is rather poor as well; I felt the lines were being read to me instead of delivered naturally. The worst offenders were Chestnut and the immunologist. Chestnut works really well with Rochelle Aytes as Mary Morstan, but his delivery is not like how I imagine Dr. Watson at all. This version of his character is very much a Holmes or House rip off; an odd choice for the doctor of Doyle’s works.

Eve Harlow’s neurologist character Ingrid Derian is described as “aloof” and “has a shaky relationship with her colleagues” which I have yet to see as of the first episode. Peter Mark Kendall has some of the best acting as the identical twins with fraternal personalities. (There is also an awkward bit in the first part of the episode where the viewer learns that one brother is dating the other’s ex -girlfriend and they resent each other over it. Yikes.) I got the impression that viewers would see that play into their relationship as the show goes on.

While the acting is fine(ish) for most of the episode, my husband and I kept noticing that one of the main cast could not get her accent straight for most of the pilot. The perpetrator: Inga Schlingmann’s character, Dr. Sasha Lubbock, immunologist. After some Google searching, Inga seems like a beautiful and talented actress who has a bright future ahead of her…if she drops the atrocious “Texan” accent she attempted during this show. Not only does the accent completely vanish for some scenes, it comes back with a marked vengeance. One of the twin doctors starts speculating on why Watson took interest and accepted them into the clinical fellowship. When he talks to Sasha, he muses that Watson wants to watch her struggle with her adoptive parents and her original Chinese heritage. Sasha claps back in the fakest accent I’ve ever heard: “I worked my a** off to get to-”

My husband had to rewind so we could hear it again, and also because we were laughing so hard we missed the rest of Dr. Croft’s expositional theorizing. In a hilarious twist, Adam Croft reveals to the audience that not only is Sasha from Texas, she’s from Dallas; and not only is it Dallas, he clarifies that her adoptive parents live in the wealthiest part of Dallas (probably Highland or University Park). Dear reader, I may not be from the wealthy part of Dallas, but I am from a decent suburb and I am sans accent.

A while ago I watched some of Criminal Minds, and a few seasons into the show the investigative team goes to Carrollton, Texas, which is the town next to where I’m from originally. The team goes to the local sheriff's office and talks to the families involved. I am not joking when I say every character from Carrollton had the thickest pseudo-Southern accent they could muster. Readers, I can assure you that no one from Carrollton sounds like that. They may have existed thirty years ago, but it is rare to hear an actual Dallasonian accent anymore; it has died out with the growing suburbs and metropolitanization.

Before I get too sidetracked, let’s go back to Watson; the worst piece of acting wasn’t even Chestnut stumbling through medical jargon or Schlingmann’s sorry Southern slang. No, the worst offender has a short conversation in his cameo at the end, and his casting was probably the most shocking thing about the show. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip to my summary section below (and hit that subscribe button if you haven’t).

Moriar-TEA (spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Professor James Moriarity, Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis, shows up at the very end as a cameo and interacts with the British lackey, who gives him a case that he implies was for someone else, possibly the dead detective. At the start of the episode we learn that Moriarty went over the waterfall with Holmes, but somehow survived and turned up in a Pennsylvania tramcar. Unfortunately, the only surprise was who they cast to play the supervillain and how poorly he delivered his lines. Instead of menacing, brilliant, or even mysterious, the actor gave the blandest line delivery I’ve ever heard.

The actor? Randall Park.

Yes, you read that correctly: they cast Asian Jim from The Office as one of the most famous villains in English literature. Do not take the rest of this section to be a Randall Park hit piece: I’ve enjoyed every single project I’ve seen him in thus far. Casting him as Professor M wouldn’t be a bad choice (he’s played villains before, most notably a certain North Korean dictator) except Park has the flattest performance of the entire episode. It sounded like he had never heard the lines before and was sounding them out at a table read. He made Inga’s line delivery sound Emmy-nominated.

I would kill to be a fly on the wall of the CBS casting directors office when they decided on Randall Park as their evil mastermind. I can hear the conversation already:

Who can we cast as the evil, conniving, and brilliantly smart supervillain in our House rip off? One of the most cunning antagonists in English literature?? Oh yeah, let’s pick the guy who plays sweet and funny people and have him read the lines off of cards like at SNL! Yeah, that’ll work!!

Unless there’s a dark side to Park I’ve never seen before, or he starts actually, y’know, acting in later episodes, I really don’t see him as the sword enemy of Sherlock Holmes. For the sake of the show, I hope I’m wrong, and Randall Park has an inhuman acting range I just don’t know about that will make a future appearance on the show.

Elementary, my dear reader…

One other gripe I have is that we only know Watson post-fall; we get very little glimpses of him before Holmes’ death. As a character, Dr. Watson operates in tandem with Sherlock Holmes. Traditionally, he is constantly tethered to Holmes in every iteration of the story. In this show, Dr. Watson doesn’t feel like his own character in orbit with Holmes; instead, he feels like a pale imitation of him. In the books and screen adaptations, Holmes becomes attached to Dr. Watson not only for his medical expertise and rudimentary observation, but for companionship. John Watson becomes his friend, something of which the quirky detective has very few. The only reference we get to this Watson/Holmes relationship is an observation made by Watson’s ex-wife in the middle of a conversation, in which she infers that Watson is a better doctor because he abandoned her to live in London with Holmes. This conversation is illuminating and one of the best scenes of the episode; it shows more of a broken and hurting John instead of robot Doctor Watson. I hope that in future episodes we see more of a relational and struggling John and less of House, M.D.

I am going to try to watch the rest of the first season and write another post with my thoughts afterward. I am hoping the show gets better as it goes on, because this is a rather poor showing. Tell me in the comments what your favorite Sherlock Holmes adaptation is - and be sure to share this Substack with a friend.

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