'Mademoiselle Holmes' Heads Stateside to PBS Passport

When the final set of Sherlock Holmes stories passed into the public domain on New Year's Day 2023, it was as if the entire entertainment sphere had been waiting for that moment to start releasing every version of the famous detective imaginable. The Arthur Conan Doyle stories were one of the more infamous ongoing public rights issues, with the majority having already passed into the public domain in the late 1990s; however, the final set were frozen as part of Disney's lobbying to push copyright from 75 years to 99, resulting in the Doyle estate suing everyone and anyone over anything they could find whenever a Sherlock project was announced.

Despite the Doyle Estates' best efforts to halt firms like Enola Holmes and shows like Sherlock, the Holmes stories have remained in the public consciousness, making the franchise a tempting subject for TV series looking to ground themselves in something viewers already know and love. In the past year alone, there have been the debuts of Watson and Sherlock & Daughter on American TV, as well as the production of Amazon's Young Sherlock in the U.K. Now the French series, Mademoiselle Holmes, which debuted on TF1 in 2024, is heading stateside to PBS as part of the Walter Presents lineup.

Like Watson, Mademoiselle Holmes is a 21st-century-minded, contemporary-set detective series (though set in Paris, not NYC). The series focuses on DS Charlotte Holmes, known to her colleagues as Charlie, the great-granddaughter of the famous sleuth, who discovers well into adulthood that she has inherited his knack for crime-solving.