Because an increasing number of cultural icons have existed for 95 years or more, they’ve legally entered the public domain and can now be exploited without paying for the right to use them in new narratives. They include the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, which explains why someone made the weird, 2025 live-action horror movie Screamboat, loosely based on Mickey’s 1928 debut cartoon Steamboat Willie. Meanwhile, characters that were created before the copyright law — Robin Hood, Zorro, and others — are essentially free intellectual property and regularly appear on both small and large screens. It’s a case of the tried and true and a function of economic expedience.
Consider that The Death of Robin Hood, a feature film with Hugh Jackman as the outlaw bowman in his twilight years, is slated for a June release, and the 19th-century novels that introduced the world to Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and his undead betrothed have spawned recent movie interpretations: Luc Besson’s Dracula, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride. But the current champion of public-domain adaptations has to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fussy, erudite Victorian-era detective, Sherlock Holmes, with the latest being Young Sherlock, a snappy eight-episode miniseries on Prime Video based on author Andrew Lane’s books that depict the sleuth’s origins and his early cases.
Launching the spate of latter-day Holmes-inspired projects, the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes was a jaunty period action-comedy directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as his sidekick, Dr. John Watson. Its box-office triumph led to a lesser 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Taking the original property in another direction, the acclaimed 2010 BBC series Sherlock, developed by Steven Moffat, was set in contemporary London, made a star of Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes, and juiced the career of Martin Freeman (The Office), who played Watson. Over the next six years, 13 crackerjack feature-length episodes were produced. The success that Ritchie and Moffat achieved may have opened the floodgates. In 2012, CBS-TV premiered Elementary — an American procedural crime drama with comedic undertones that teamed Jonny Lee Miller as a modern-day Holmes in New York City with Lucy Liu as his assistant and de facto caretaker Dr. Joan Watson. It was popular enough to run for seven seasons.
Adding youth and changing dynamics
Further tweaking canon, writer Nancy Springer came up with the character of teen investigator Enola Holmes — Sherlock’s precociously bright sister — for a series of nine books that have inspired two movies to date: 2020’s Enola Holmes and 2022’s Enola Holmes 2, both with Millie Bobby Brown as the girl and Henry Cavill as her famous elder brother. CBS wasn’t done recalibrating elements of Doyle’s novels, and the network delivered Watson — a hybrid of medical drama and mystery — early last year. The setup: Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) is on his own, running a clinic in Pittsburgh, Penn., after the purported death of his companion, Sherlock Holmes. On top of that, Watson is solving crimes. Later in 2025, the CW ran episodes of Sherlock & Daughter, another serialized extrapolation of Holmes and his world. This one features an older Sherlock (David Thewlis) drawn into the life of a young American woman who believes that he’s her father.
Young Sherlock is a rejuvenation of the legendary detective in ways beyond the obvious focus on his salad days.
What’s clear is that Holmes, his comrades, his family, and his enemies are durable and malleable enough to have inspired many varied renditions. Further proof of that is Young Sherlock, which is easily the best TV series about the detective since the one with Cumberbatch and Freeman. One might suspect the overall quality to diminish with each succeeding take. Not this time. Young Sherlock is a rejuvenation of the legendary detective in ways beyond the obvious focus on his salad days. It’s a high-quality production and rip-roaring adventure that shifts the action from the halls of learning in Oxford to the Holmes family estate to more exotic locales as 19-year-old Sherlock and his newfound friend James Moriarty (who is destined to become his arch-enemy) are confronted with a conspiracy to upend the global balance of power in the 1870s.
At this point in his life, Sherlock is short on self-control, but his fierce intellect and powers of observation are growing. His older brother Mycroft is working for the British government and serving as Sherlock’s unofficial guardian; their mother Cordelia remains confined to a sanitarium since losing her daughter on a family outing; and their father Silas is working overseas. Sherlock’s ill-fated friendship with Moriarty is, for the moment, a welcome source of strength, especially when an enigmatic Chinese princess arrives at Oxford on a clandestine mission, a prominent professor of science is slain, and Sherlock is accused of the killing.
Verve and hints of a future
Doyle’s tales of Holmes were cleverly plotted thrillers with no pretense of being lofty literature. Young Sherlock is in that spirit — an engaging mix of murder, mayhem, international intrigue, and familial entanglement with nimble dialogue delivered by a cast that’s ideal for this sort of thing. The enterprise rises or falls with Sherlock, so it’s a net positive to have him played by the handsome, likeable Hero Fiennes Tiffin, nephew of the renowned actor Ralph Fiennes. There’s actually a genetic connection reinforcing a key relationship in the show. Tiffin’s other uncle, Joseph Fiennes, plays Sherlock’s brilliant, secretive father, Silas. Other notables in the ensemble are Natascha McElhone as the loving and tormented Cordelia, Dónal Finn as the mercurial Moriarty, Max Irons as the straight-laced Mycroft, and Colin Firth as arrogant aristocrat Bucephalus Hodge.
As an origin story, the series has its share of Easter eggs that nod to aspects of the fully-formed Sherlock’s personality, style, and career. We see crucial relationships in his life as they begin and progress, such as the unexpected rapport with Moriarty and an encounter with the policeman who will become Sherlock’s longtime Scotland Yard connection, Inspector Lestrade. And even if Sherlock doesn’t sport his trademark deerstalker hat, pipe, and cloak, someone else does. Throughout Young Sherlock, it feels as if the people behind it knew what they were doing. With that in mind, it makes sense that Guy Ritchie — director of 2009’s Sherlock Holmes movie and its sequel — is on board as an executive producer and also directed the first two episodes. Ritchie’s familiarity with Holmes and company has to have been an asset. You might say the quality of his contribution is … elementary.
All episodes of Young Sherlock are available to stream on Prime Video.