'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.