'Watson' to Debut a "Sherlock without Sherlock" Series

It was big news at the beginning of 2024 when the first iteration of Mickey Mouse passed out of copyright into the public domain, not just because the iconic Disney icon had been under protection for so long, but because the company actively worked to change laws to keep it that way for decades. In 1998, Congress literally passed a 15-year extension freezing anything from moving into the public domain at their lobbying behest, keeping thousands of characters out of circulation, save one: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the early versions of which sadly missed the cutoff. Holmes' copyright loss has been TV's gain, including Enola Holmes on Netflix, Sherlock on PBS, Elementary on CBS, and now the forthcoming Watson.

As linear loses ground year after year to streaming, the remaining broadcast networks are desperately pitching around to find something, anything that works. ABC dug deep and came up with The Golden Bachelor; NBC dug deeper and came up with.... nothing really. CBS hopes returning to 2012 might work when the Sherlock series Elementary was its biggest new hit. Set in 21st-century New York City, it starred British actor Jonny Lee Miller (The Crown) as Sherlock Holmes and American actor Lucy Liu (Strange Worlds) as Dr. Joan Watson.

Though the series was overshadowed by the other contemporary Sherlock series on PBS, the "Female Watson" angle got a lot of attention at the time, and the series managed to run far longer than the British version to boot, giving it credibility by the time it concluded in 2018. Now CBS is going back to that well, but this time, there won't be a white British dude playing Sherlock. In fact, there won't be a Sherlock at all.