EXCLUSIVE: Young Sherlock is Prime Video’s number one show and its producers have high hopes it stretches to Season 2 and beyond.
The eight-parter is the origin story of the titular detective, played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin, and takes in the friendship between Holmes and nemesis-in-waiting James Moriarty, played by Dónal Finn. What starts out as a murder mystery set amid Oxford’s dreaming spires becomes a globe-trotting adventure with a very personal angle for Holmes and family.
Most viewers will know that the two main protagonists ultimately become foes, which lends their on-screen relationship an edge amid the banter and bonhomie.
“There’s a sort of inexplicable attraction between them because they stimulate each other as only intellectually they can; they’ve each met their match. At a young age, that translates immediately into friendship, but the competition between them and the foundations of the enmity are all there,” says Simon Maxwell, an exec producer and the founder of Fifth Season-backed drama label Motive Pictures, which makes the series.
He explains that when it came to the Holmes-Moriarty buddy act, the producers looked to the chemistry of another famous duo. “The relationship fizzes and crackles because you’re bringing that foreknowledge of what they will become, but meanwhile you’re just enjoying the ride of seeing a kind of Butch and Sundance dynamic. We wanted a lead cast who had oodles of charm.”
Matthew Parkhill & Simon Maxwell (L-R) on the set of Young Sherlock
Ritchie & Parkhill’s Take
Mathew Parkhill is writer and showrunner and Guy Ritchie was lead director, the first time the duo have worked together. Ritchie revisits a familiar patch having made two Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role.
There are some of the director’s characteristic flourishes along the way, and the tone is set early; thumping Kasabian track ‘Days Are Forgotten’ plays in the opening credits, leading into a prison-yard fight moments into the first episode.
The adventures and sleuthing that follow, however, are mostly in family friendly territory. “It had to feel sophisticated and emotionally rich enough for the adult audience, but also appealing for the younger generation,” Maxwell says. “Hopefully, we’ve hit all of those demographics and made a show that can feel like Saturday night at the movies, but with a modern sensibility. Those shows are few and far between these days.”
Investigating Holmes & Moriarty
Telling an origin story meant the freedom to put a different kind of Holmes on screen. “He’s a work in progress, and we’re watching him making mistakes, and being formed against the wet stone of other characters, with Moriarty being a key one,” Maxwell says.
“We obviously owe a massive debt to Arthur Conan Doyle and the canon, but we paid absolutely no heed to other [film and TV] adaptations. We wanted this to be its own thing. That was helped by the fact that it’s foundational and an origin story, or rather, it’s two origin stories. The idea that they were great friends before they became mortal enemies allowed us so much freedom.”
The series ages up the main characters from Andrew Lane’s eponymous book series, upon which it is loosely based. That still leaves a lot of runway before we get to Holmes as the master detective based at 221B Baker Street and Moriarty as shadowy master criminal.
Is Season 2 Afoot?
Hero Fiennes Tiffin as Holmes & Dónal Finn as Moriarty in Young Sherlock
There are clues about the person Moriarty is destined become in Season 1. “The foundations of the conflict [with Holmes] and the first fault lines in the relationship start to emerge in a really organic way,” Maxwell says. “We see the first flicker of a darker criminal psychology, something that could even become, ultimately, sociopathy.”
As such, the hope is to tell more of the story. Having traversed the UK and Spain as locations for the first season, producers are already recce’ing spots for a sophomore run. There is no official green light from Prime Video, but given the performance on the platform and abundant source material hopes are running high.
“We know that in terms of the origin and coming-of-age story, we’ve just told the first stage. It is absolutely designed to be a multi-season show,” Maxwell says.
“We want to track the journeys that each of these characters are going to go on… by bringing Sherlock and Moriarty into the same frame, and positioning them as friends, what you’re implicitly promising the audience is that you’re going to show them how they become enemies.”
People are back in position if Prime Video pushes the button. “It’s too early to say that it’s a green light, but we’ve got the core team and we’re in the early stages of prep, I would say. We’ve all worked together, obviously driven by Matthew, to build the story for a Season 2.
“The intention is very much for Guy to come back and kick it off again with us.”
