Watson Review: Morris Chestnut Solves Medical Mysteries in CBS's Clever Sherlock Holmes Update

Of all the fictional characters in the public domain, Dr. John Watson never seemed to be crying out for a moment in the spotlight. Watson has mostly been defined by his relationship to Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant detective whose adventures he faithfully recounted. Like his creator, author Arthur Conan Doyle, Watson is a physician, but the scientific skill and reasoning power that the profession requires have almost always taken a backseat to Holmes'. Watson has never been just along for the ride, but he usually functions as a sounding board for Holmes' theories. Though some interpretations have emphasized aspects of the character apart from his function as Holmes' sidekick, he's almost always been defined in relation to the eccentric detective. Who is Watson without Holmes, anyway?

It's an unseen Holmes who begins answering that question in Watson, a new series created by Craig Sweeny. The series' first scene restages the last moments of "The Final Problem," the 1893 story in which Doyle (temporarily) killed off Holmes by sending him over Germany's Reichenbach Falls in pursuit of his archfoe, Moriarty. Here, Watson (Morris Chestnut) follows the pair, then awakens in a hospital with Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), a reformed criminal who served as Holmes' occasional underworld contact, at his bedside. Johnson has some bad news: Only Watson survived the fall (suffering a traumatic brain injury in the process). He has some other news, too: Holmes left behind a fortune to fund the Holmes Clinic, a cutting edge medical facility he wants Watson to run.

That's a brisk bit of setup that gets Watson up and running, but it quickly becomes apparent that there's a lot more going on once the pilot fast-forwards six months and moves the action to Pittsburgh. (Between this series and The Pitt, medical facilities in Pittsburgh are having a TV moment.) There, Watson has gotten the clinic running (with Johnson's help) and staffed it with young doctors who view him as a figure as brilliant as he is mysterious — a bit like Watson once viewed Holmes. But the Holmes Clinic isn't an entirely smooth-running operation. Watson's boss at the hospital running the clinic is none other than Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes), the wife he left behind to follow Holmes and who moved on in his absence, personally if not professionally. What's more, that brain injury keeps presenting side effects, and Johnson might know more about what happened at Reichenbach Falls than he's let on. (To say more would be a spoiler, but it does involve an inspired bit of counterintuitive casting.)

7.1

Watson

at CBS

Like

• Fun premise
• Lively performances
• Gentle absurdity
• Colorful recreations of history

Dislike

• It's at its most engaging when it doesn't worry that much about the main plot

Sweeny's past credits include work on Elementary, another modernized updating of Doyle's characters. Watson is unrelated, but, like its predecessor, it's a brisk, lively procedural undergirded by some ongoing plot threads. Some of these directly concern Watson, whom Chestnut plays as a man of tremendous intelligence who uses an air of self-confidence to keep others at a distance that doesn't always hide his own vulnerabilities. They're evident to Mary, who knows him and still cares for him even if she doesn't seem to have any interest in reviving their marriage. They're clear, too, to Johnson, who knows how much medicine Watson is taking in order to stay on his feet. And sometimes Watson's employees sense chinks in the armor, too.

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Some of the most promising moments in Watson's entertaining opening episodes — CBS provided the first five to critics — involve the young characters who aren't sure whether to fear or revere their boss. Ingrid (Eve Harlow), a neurologist with a suspicious past that she's unsuccessfully kept hidden from Watson, is the most aggressive in challenging her mentor. Others wonder why they're there. Does Watson's interest in the roles played by nature and nurture explain the presence of Stephens and Adam (both played by Peter Mark Kendall), identical twins with sharply contrasting personalities? Is that why he hired Sasha (Inga Schlingmann), who was born in China but speaks in a thick accent that reveals her Texas upbringing? Are they part of a study of some kind?

Crisply shot and filled with lively banter delivered by an appealing cast, Watson understands the medical procedural formula: rare but real conditions like "maple syrup urine disease" and "uncombable hair syndrome" play roles in the story, symptoms that suggest one ailment mask the presence of another, illnesses reveal family secrets, and so on. But the series knows both how to make the formula work and when to break with it. In one episode, for instance, Watson and his team treat a patient suffering from sickle cell diseases, and the only real mystery is what kind of medical system keeps the cure for the condition out of the hands of those who can't afford it. (A subplot in which an amateur genetic engineer [Nat Faxon] develops a process to make his chest glow balances out the heaviness.)

With a mystery of the week and an overstuffed cast, Watson almost has more going on than needed to sustain an ongoing series. The overarching mystery about what's going on with Watson and hidden malevolent forces pulling strings even Watson can't see still feels a little underdeveloped, but these early episodes make even the smallest plot strands, like Stephens' crush on the sort-of-but-not-really engaged Sasha, compelling. Watson uses both time-tested characters and a familiar model, but the show itself never seems tired or overly familiar. Maybe Watson had everything he needed to be a solo act all along.

Premieres: Sunday, Jan. 26 on CBS after the AFC Championship (approximately 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT). Regular airings begin Sunday, Feb. 16 at 9/8c.
Who's in it: Morris Chestnut, Eve Harlow, Rochelle Aytes
Who's behind it: Craig Sweeny
For fans of: Medical mysteries, clever procedurals, classic characters in contemporary settings
How many episodes we watched: 5