Examining ‘Young Sherlock’: Showrunner Matthew Parkhill Reveals What Makes His Origin Story Tick

Supersleuth Sherlock Holmes can deduce people’s methods and motives from the mud on their shoes, the mustard on lapels, or even an excellent or shoddy job of shaving. But to reimagine him as a nineteen-year-old inYoung Sherlock, showrunner Matthew Parkhill turned his magnifying glass on the world’s most famous detective from the inside out

“Sherlock is quite a strange man in many, many ways. He’s a loner. He’s distant. He’s cold. … And I was quite interested in the psychology of that,” he said.

Young Sherlock on Prime Video is an origin story for the character Arthur Conan Doyle introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, launching a passionate fandom. However, instead of dusting off the pipe, the violin, and other familiar Holmesian tics, Parkhill and his team pictured Sherlock not as the consulting detective he becomes but as a brilliant and awkward young man with a sense of wonder, “quite a live wire,” in Parkhill’s words.

This Sherlock (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) is a porter at Oxford University in the 1870s—a kind of probation his upstanding brother, Mycroft (Max Irons, Miss Austen) devises after Sherlock, fascinated with Oliver Twist, gets pinched practicing his pickpocketing skills. Naturally, lecturing the judge about British law nets Sherlock more months in lockup.

While at Oxford, Sherlock confronts a childhood trauma and his first case with the help of an equally intelligent yet impetuous friend: James Moriarty (Dónal Finn, The Wheel of Time). An Oxford scholarship student, James is more affable than the criminal mastermind Conan Doyle crafted as Holmes’s nemesis. He’s even somewhat protective, stepping in when the hotheaded Sherlock takes a beating. Far from elementary!

The eight-part series currently holds an 83% “Fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Some critics found it “loud, brash and blokey,” but others appreciated the “origami puzzle of secrets” and the actors’ entertaining interplay. “[T]hey clock each other as fellow misfits, outsiders, and the only two people in the room sharp enough to keep up with one another,” said The Playlist. “There’s real charisma there.”

Parkhill had no idea whether any of this would fly. “My first reaction was just fear,” he said. “It’s always tricky, because everyone has their own interpretation of a character. Everyone has their own Sherlock Holmes, right?”

Here, Parkhill unpacks facing that fear, unearthing inspiration, and how to tackle any story—even a famed intellectual property (IP)—by finding an intriguing spark.

Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels and 56 short stories, narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson, have inspired other writers and filmmakers for decades. The 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution pictured Holmes unraveling a kidnapping plot while recovering from cocaine addiction with the help of real-life psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, of all people. More recently, the BBC’s Sherlock in the 2000s dropped Holmes and Watson into the modern day, starring a pre-Marvel Universe Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman and earning several Primetime Emmy Awards.

A teacher of English literature and history before breaking into screenwriting, Parkhill has created several TV series, including the police procedural Rogue and political thriller Deep State with producer Simon Maxwell. So when Maxwell began developing the idea for a young Sherlock series with director Guy Ritchie, who brought more fisticuffs and flash to the sleuth with 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, both starring Robert Downey Jr., he asked Parkhill to come aboard.

The filmmakers had secured the rights to the Young Sherlock Holmes book series by author Andy Lane. Parkhill’s teenage daughter read the books, but Parkhill said he had a tough time thinking of how to break down a story around fourteen-year-old schoolboy who already acted like the Sherlock we adore. Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Chris Columbus (Gremlins, The Goonies) already had a younger but very-much-Sherlock and Watson in 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes.

Instead, Parkhill listened to audiobooks of Conan Doyle’s works and mused about the character. His own favorite Sherlock story is A Study in Scarlet because of its jumps in location. He realized, “What if the creative playground is anything before that?”

As he pitched his vision to Maxwell and Ritchie, they homed in on two things: What had made Sherlock become so withdrawn? And what had set he and Moriarty against each other?

“To me, it’s not all that interesting for a writer if all I’m doing is just copying that character and making him younger. I was more interested in trying to imagine, What if he was full of life? What if he was full of charisma? What if he was full of energy, kind of wild, and something happened that made him become … You know, you see that all the time in people’s lives, whether it’s a broken heart or whether it’s grief, or whether it’s a hard life. These things happen to us in the in the course of our lives that that change us and make us become different versions of ourselves later on. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’m not the same person now that I was when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-four. I’m a lot less responsible,” he added with a laugh.

The series unravels two mysteries, the first involving the theft of priceless Chinese scrolls at Oxford, a visiting princess (Zine Tseng, 3 Body Problem), murder, missing professors, and a covert chemical-weapons program. Meanwhile, Sherlock discovers more about the death of his younger sister, touching on his mother, Cordelia (Natascha McElhone, Halo), and father, Silas (Joseph Fiennes, Prisoner 951, Fiennes Tiffin’s uncle).

The writers’ room includes Steve Thompson of the BBC’s Sherlock, whose plots frequently referenced Conan Doyle’s stories and characters. Young Sherlock isn’t as heavy on these, but it nods to them, such as the humor around a deerstalker cap in a haberdashery. “Moriarty even says, ‘If you start wearing a hat like that, you and I can never be friends,” Parkhill said.

Ritchie directed two episodes, giving the show a similar feel to his Sherlock films, but this Sherlock isn’t a young version of Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal. The series is more like a cousin to those films in “attitude and tone and swagger and irreverence,” Parkhill said.

This young Sherlock gets a lot wrong. “Our Sherlock is just useless. Can’t fight to save his life. He’s good at avoiding punches, but he’s not going to throw them. And then it’s Moriarty that ends up teaching him how to because Moriarty is a brawler,” he said. “Hero, bless him, walks around with quite a lot of bruises and bloody noses.”

The Moriarty friendship is an intriguing twist. He and Holmes only meet face-to-face in one Conan Doyle story, The Final Problem. But since Watson only narrates what he witnesses or what Sherlock tells him, Parkhill wondered if perhaps the two adversaries had known each other earlier in life.

“Moriarty has become such an iconic villain… And I started to think about often, you know, great friendships turn into great enemies,” he said.

Unlike Watson, Moriarty is not a sidekick, something that gets under his skin when a character refers to James as such. “I think they are two peas in a pod,” Parkhill said. "They are genuine intellectual equals. It’s very, very rare that either Moriarty or Sherlock ever meets someone at their level, and that’s why they’re drawn to each other at the start.”

Young Sherlock also plants the seeds for Moriarty’s origin, noticing where James is tempted to do something Sherlock is not. “There’s a line in [the book] The Return of Sherlock Holmes, when [Sherlock] talks to Watson and says, ‘I would have made a great criminal.’ … Moriarty recognizes himself in Sherlock, and Sherlock recognizes himself in Moriarty, but I think Moriarty is less constrained by the rules.”

With annual domestic box office revenue lower than in years past (from 2021 to 2024, it was about $2 billion to $3 billion behind 2017 to 2019), Hollywood continues to lean heavily on IP, like Sherlock Holmes. Although Sinners, an original concept, took home this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Parrot Analytics notes that around 40 to 50 percent of the top 100 TV shows and 70 to 80 percent of the top 100 movies are based on preexisting IP, including streaming hits such as Bridgerton, The Boys, Fallout, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Reacher.

“I understand it from both sides,” Parkhill said. “From the writer’s side, you want to explore new material, but …it takes a lot of money to make these things … Look, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. We all know that, because if there was, people would be making hit after hit after hit after hit, and no one does that.”

If you work on an IP, look for a way into what might feel familiar. “Find things that on whatever level excite you,” Parkhill said. His favorite Young Sherlock episode, Episode 5, explores what happened the day Holmes’s sister died through things “that are incredibly personal to me.”

Don’t get disheartened, he added, and sharpen your skills and ideas so you’re ready.

“I talk to younger writers, and it’s a hard game. Weirdly, with AI, it’s only going to get harder, I think,” he said. “[But] there’s the practical element of it, which is, you’ve just got to keep going. You’ve got to keep your hours. I used to write in evenings and weekends for a long time before I could afford to earn a living. … Even now, I get to the desk at a certain time; I have a coffee break at some time. I mean, I keep my hours, even on those down days when it feels like it’s all [expletive] and nothing’s working. … Ass plus chair equals writing, right? That’s the equation.”

Young Sherlock is streaming on Amazon Prime.