Through the many decades since visual media have been around, people have been making adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories based on the stories from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The trick is taking Doyle's shorter works and making them long enough for a deeper dive into the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
A quick Google search (if you trust that sort of thing) of how many adaptations there have been about Sherlock tells us there have been more than 250. That seems light. But the best adaptation arrived on Prime Video on July 1, and one look at the header photo for this article tells you what that iteration is.
The BBC could not have cast any series better than it did Sherlock, the best take on Doyle's tales. Benedict Cumberbatch as the famous detective and Martin Freeman as his sidekick, the good doctor? Perfect, and likely never to be equaled.
But there is no reason to stop with Cumberbatch and Freeman, either. Sherlock's archrival Moriarty is played beautifully by Andrew Scott, while Mycroft Holmes is played by the always efficiently fantastic Mark Gatiss.
If you haven't seen the four seasons of Sherlock, each season is three episodes long, and each episode is feature film length, because you oddly don't know much about the well-known actors, just know that the actors have also been involved in other delicious crime-related programming.
Scott, for instance, was nominated for work on Ripley, a psychological thriller miniseries that is worthy of that description. Scott understands nuance and control while delivering the right amount of evil on Sherlock.
Freeman might be best known for his role as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit films, but he has appeared in numerous high-level projects. His Dr. John Watson is more emotional than in Doyle's stories, but Freeman only makes the character feel more human.
Plus, if you like Sherlock, you should also catch Freeman in the excellent police drama The Responder. Don't expect much of Watson in The Responder's Chris Carson, but it only shows the depth of Freeman's talent.
What makes Sherlock truly work is the modern setting for Doyle's stories, which were written around the beginning of the 20th century.
Mark Gatiss (Mycroft) and Steven Moffat created the series for the BBC, and it was also shown in the United States as part of PBS' Masterpiece series. Gatiss and Moffat clearly understood the source material well and kept the same kind of haunting Victorian vibe without making the series feel dated.
Is it stylized to a great degree? Of course, but anything less and the series would have struggled. Instead, viewers wind up with four seasons of three episodes and one one-off special that feels much more like 13 movies. Each is worth seeing, for fans of Sherlock Holmes or those with no previous knowledge of the detective and his dealings with the criminal underworld.
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