Set in 1870s Oxford, “Young Sherlock” imagines Sherlock Holmes before Baker Street legend calcified around him — a 19-year-old hothead, raw, undisciplined, and already in trouble, pulled into his first major case when a murder and a larger international conspiracy threaten his freedom and set him on the road toward the detective he will become. It’s a perfectly serviceable origin-story setup, the kind of premise that gives a series room to build character, rivalry, and myth. But from the start, the show feels less interested in deduction than in dressing the case up with swagger.
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What begins with Sherlock Holmes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) as a disgraced young troublemaker — hauled out of jail by his older brother Mycroft Holmes (Max Irons) and shipped off to Oxford — quickly turns into the show’s central case. At Magdalen, Sherlock slips into an advanced mathematics lecture and meets James Moriarty (a super charismatic Dónal Finn), and the two become pals less through sentiment than through immediate intellectual recognition: they clock each other as fellow misfits, outsiders, and the only two people in the room sharp enough to keep up with one another. When priceless Chinese scrolls tied to visiting Princess Gulun Shou’an (Zine Tseng) are stolen, Sherlock is blamed, Moriarty loses his scholarship in the fallout, and the pair join forces to clear their names — a pursuit that soon expands from a campus theft and a murder accusation into missing professors, bomb plots, and the oily influence of Sir Bucephalus Hodge (Colin Firth).
From there, the season’s main mystery widens into the killings of powerful Oxford men tied to a covert chemical-weapons program, while Shou’an — moving through the story under the alias Xiao Wei — is revealed to be less a mysterious royal visitor than an avenging survivor of a village destroyed by the nerve agent known as “creeping death.” Running alongside that conspiracy is the more personal case that keeps haunting Sherlock: the supposed death of his younger sister Beatrice, a family trauma that shattered his mother Cordelia Holmes (Natascha McElhone) and left Sherlock blaming himself for years. As Sherlock and Moriarty dig deeper, the show suggests Beatrice’s fate may have been covered up, folding that old family wound into the larger Oxford conspiracy. That thread — the one involving Beatrice, Sherlock’s guilt, and the slow realization that the Holmes family itself may have been manipulated — winds up carrying more emotional weight than the series’ busier imperial intrigue.
The first two episodes are riddled with Guy Ritchie-isms — speed-ramping, anachronistic punk, funk, or disco drops, a jittery sense of movement, a cheeky lad attitude, an everything-at-once restlessness meant to suggest energy by brute force. But those flourishes don’t feel newly discovered so much as pulled from evidence lockers we’ve seen opened before. The clue is hiding in plain sight: all that style keeps pointing to familiarity. The series wants to make young Sherlock into a rapscallion — brilliant, impulsive, forever one bad choice away from trouble — but the storytelling around him rarely uncovers a fresh angle on that archetype.
Even the show’s signature visual conceit, where Sherlock and usually Moriarty step back into memory and prowl around inside a past event to reexamine its details, lands with a thud more often than not. It’s obviously a metaphorical device, a stylized way of retracing the steps of an event and worrying a clue from every side, but it plays less like insight than gimmick — a kind of freeze-frame time travel that lets the series congratulate itself for invention it hasn’t really earned. Instead of sharpening the mystery, those sequences often make the show feel sillier, as if it’s trying to solve the case with editing tricks rather than actual imagination.
What does work, and what keeps the show from going fully cold, is the chemistry between Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Dónal Finn. Sherlock is framed as more lover than fighter, Moriarty more brawler than peacemaker, but both are clever, inventive, hyper-alert, and naturally watchable. Their scenes together have the spark the rest of the series keeps straining to manufacture. There’s real charisma there, the kind that makes you lean in even when the material itself is only half-convincing. If the show has any real pulse, it’s in the push and pull between these two young actors, who seem to understand that charm can sometimes cover for a multitude of narrative sins.
The supporting cast helps too. Zine Tseng is one of the better reasons to stay on the case as Princess Gulun Shou’an, who moves through the story under the alias Xiao Wei, bringing severity, mystery, and some welcome conviction to a role the show doesn’t always fully know how to use. Natascha McElhone remains compelling almost by default. Joseph Fiennes is solid. Colin Firth plays a superb asshole as Sir Bucephalus Hodge, leaning into the part’s oily entitlement with relish. And maybe the nicest surprise of all is Max Irons as Mycroft Holmes, who has one of his best roles in years and plays the snooty, judicious Brit beautifully. Holly Cattle is super captivating as Hodge’s mysterious assistant, and you can see why she’d catch the eye here. Even actors in smaller parts, including Numan Acar and Simon Delaney, add texture where they can.
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But those performances mostly function as camouflage, a way of distracting from how ordinary the rest of the enterprise is. The plotting is busy without being especially gripping. The direction has surface zip but not much deeper personality. Even the show’s bigger revelations — including the late-game turn involving Holmes’ father — register as curiously unremarkable, the sort of twist you note and move past rather than savor. “Young Sherlock” keeps scattering visual red herrings, but once you brush past the noise, there’s not much mystery to the diagnosis: this is a mildly entertaining, fundamentally generic streaming series that mistakes motion for invention.
If anything, “Young Sherlock” should serve as a strong calling card for Fiennes Tiffin, Finn, Cattle, and Tseng, all of whom seem poised to break out in hopefully better material. That may be the clearest takeaway from the whole investigation. The evidence points less to a must-watch new Holmes chapter than to a handful of performers worth tracking from here. Unless you’re a casting agent, or a truly die-hard Sherlock Holmes completist determined to inspect every clue in the canon, there isn’t an especially convincing reason to open this case file. [C]