The creator of Sherlock & Daughter has broken down his take on Holmes, and it’s an emotional one.
“Sherlock Holmes is classically an unemotional character in the stories, but he’s also a big experimenter,” Brendan Foley said at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival. “So, is it possible that just once in that great experimenter’s life, he might have thought, what’s all this human emotion stuff about?”
The emotion relates to David Thewlis’ Holmes’ relationship with Blu Hunt’s character in the series, Amelia. The pair join forces on a case and it transpires Holmes may be her father. Dougray Scott, meanwhile, stars as Moriarty.
Elaborating on the series’ take on Holmes, Foley said: “He is an absolutely classic Sherlock, but is also a ‘lion in winter’. And then we’re able to play with the other side, to bring in the younger audience, which is through Blu’s character.”
The “lion in winter’ reference means this version of Holmes is much more seasoned than several of the other recent takes on the sleuth. “You think of recent Sherlocks, and they’re all kind of wonderful, young and on the go, learning the ropes, and breaking the rules,” Foley said. “Our Holmes has done it all. He’s done every case. He’s always 12 steps ahead of everybody else. He knows exactly what his lane is.”
The series has fared well on The CW and HBO Max, which took second-window rights in the U.S. It is in HBO Max’s top-ten rail and has been as high as fourth, and is The CW’s top scripted series in linear. Starlings Entertainment produces the series with Albion Television and StoryFirst with James Duff (Major Crimes) the showrunner and executive producer.
With numerous Sherlock projects in the works, as well as the scores that have gone before, Foley said no-one should go into a Holmes project lightly.
“It’s effectively as genre, a sort of Holmes-iverse,” he said. “It’s a balancing act. You have to be true to the original stories and the spirit, but you also have to give people something new.”
The CW has not yet made a call on a second season of the show. It has been selling well globally, with pre-sales including to Warner Bros. Discovery in the UK, NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden and Amedia in the CIS region. Federation is distributing outside German-speaking territories where Palatin is across sales.