CBS Moves 'Watson' Season 2's Premiere to October

The institutional collapse of a production studio that stood for over a century was never going to be pleasant, but the current situation at Paramount is particularly horrifying. After bribing a sitting president to allow her to offload her family's legacy, Shari Redstone's soon-to-be-former company has managed to make everything exponentially worse. Between courting right-wing grifters, planning to hire back people it was well rid of, and the mass cancellation of the streaming franchise that propped it up for a decade, there's not much good news coming out of Paramount+ or CBS. And that was before it pulled the plug on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

However, lost in the (entirely correct) uproar over the ending of a television institution is a surprising piece of news: Watson Season 2 will return much earlier than expected. The series was a mid-season launch for CBS in early 2025. Although it was a Sherlock Holmes series without Sherlock Holmes as the lead, the series performed exceptionally well for the network, especially when streaming on Paramount+. When the series was announced for a second season, it was clear no one wanted to mess with success, listing the series to return in the same post-New Year's slot.

(Sherlock series have been doing well in general, Sherlock & Daughter, on CBS' collapsing neighbor network, CW, was also one of the small bright spots in the 2024-2025 TV season, though it had not yet been renewed.)

However, that was two months ago, before all the gruesome events, and with the network desperate for a bright spot, it is rushing the series back to the small screen, announcing it will return to the lineup in mid-October 2025, just six months after its Season 1 finale.

Watson doesn't have an official Season 2 synopsis, considering it is technically a medical mystery-of-the-week show. However, showrunner Craig Sweeney has been giving interviews where he discusses where the show's overarching plot will head next:

“So what I like about our plan in Season 2 is that we’re definitely not saying that no more villains from the Holmes universe appear, but we are creating a paradigm that includes Conan Doyle’s world without saying the premise is always what villain appears this year. So there is a really strong Holmesian storyline, but our plan is not to say, oh, this is Gruner or Milverton. Not to say that we won’t do that in time, but we wanted to sort of open up the paradigm of a new kind of storytelling within that universe in Season 2. So that’s our approach there.”

American actor Morris Chestnut will continue to star as the titular Watson; most of the Season 1 cast is also slated to return. That includes British actors Matt Berry (Great Expectations) and Ritchie Coster (Billions), Canadian actor Eve Harlow (Trigger Point), and American actors Rochelle Aytes (Monarch), Peter Mark Kendall (The Americans), and Inga Schlingmann (Take Two). 

Showrunner Craig Sweeny (The Code) is the lead writer on the show, with director Larry Teng (Nancy Drew) helming episodes. Sweeny, Teng, and Chestnut serve as executive producers alongside Sallie Patrick, Shäron Moalem MD, PhD, Brian Morewitz, and Aaron Kaplan for Kapital Entertainment. Paramount Global Content Distribution distributes the series. 

Watson Season 2 will debut as part of CBS's 2025-2026 TV season's Fall Premiere Week, on Monday, October 13, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET, with episodes streaming the next day on Paramount+.