'Watson' Lands a Paramount+ Premiere Date

New Year's Day 2023 was a momentous moment in Sherlock Homes history, as the 1990s-era Disney-backed rule forced copyright from 75 to 99 years finally expired for the rest of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate after a nearly 30-year gap. The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries was one of the few properties that weren't lucky enough to be fully included in Disney's 25-year blockade of anything new passing into the public domain, and the estate had been as litigious as possible over whatever it could argue as a result. 

With the works now fully available, Sherlock spinoffs could finally do whatever they wanted with the characters. The result has been a spate of new projects, including Sherlock & Daughter, Young Sherlock, and now this more experimental Sherlock-without-Sherlock, the Morris Chestnut-starring Watson.

CBS is the most recent American broadcaster to have a successful Sherlock Holmes series; 2009's Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, was a better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be procedural. (For non-American readers, CBS is the network behind every variant of CSI and NCIS. It just successfully relaunched Matlock, of all things. They're good at these, is what I'm saying.) But Watson is part of the new genre mashup trend; it's not just a Sherlock-set universe and the base police procedural that entails. Remember, Watson is a medical doctor, and when he's not taking leaves of absence from work to go criminal hunting with his super annoying bestie, he works at a hospital. Naturally, that makes it a medical drama by default, because Dr. Watson is the central character.

Here's the series synopsis:

Watson takes place seven months after the 2023 death of the titular character’s friend and partner, Sherlock Holmes, at the hands of Moriarty. Dr. John Watson resumes his medical career in Pittsburgh as the head of a clinic dedicated to treating rare disorders. Watson’s old life isn’t done with him, though – Moriarty and Watson are set to write their own chapter of a story that has fascinated audiences for over a century. Watson is a medical show with a strong investigative spine, featuring a modern version of one of history’s greatest detectives as he turns his attention from solving crimes to solving medical mysteries.

Chestnut leads a cast that includes British actor Ritchie Coster (The Great & the Small), Russian actor Eve Harlow (Next), and American actors Rochelle Aytes (Monarch), Peter Mark Kendall (The Americans), and Inga Schlingmann (Take Two). In an interview with Deadline ahead of the first episodes debuting at MIPCOM Cannes 2024 on Saturday, October 19, Chestnut said he felt the show was very clever: “Watson really learned a lot from Holmes, and so what he’s going to do is bring in the detective aspect of what he’s learned from working with him,” Chestnut said. “We’re basically medical detectives.”

CBS is putting a lot of faith in this show, as it's being given one of the few guaranteed-to-be-watched slots left in the linear program's calendar year: The Post-AFC Championship. (Last year, CBS had the Super Bowl, and the show that followed, Tracker, is now the network's big hit, so the hope is obviously for a repeat performance.) Chestnut is also familiar to CBS audiences, having starred in multiple medical and police procedurals on the network. Perhaps that Elementary magic still exists.

Watson premieres Sunday, January 26, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET (or whenever the game actually ends). A few weeks later, beginning Sunday, February 16, 2025, the series will launch with weekly installments airing/streaming at 10 p.m. ET.