The greatest strength of CBS’ new medical drama Watson is its potential for audacity. This is a show built for big, wild swings that either knock the ball clear out of the park or whiff so bad that everyone ends up in the hospital – whatever happens, it should be fun to watch. (And in the event of that mass hospitalization: Sounds like the seeds of a great episode of Watson.) Unfortunately, the series’ first five episodes are occasionally modest with their exam-room conundrums, and they come close to wasting both an excessively creative premise and a steady leading performance from Morris Chestnut. Because Watson isn’t just a new CBS medical drama, it’s also yet another modern revival of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes universe… that also happens to be a medical drama. And a mystery show. And a light thriller about the machinations of an evil villain. And sometimes a commentary on America’s healthcare system. And sometimes it’s about how high-functioning addicts can gaslight the people around them.
But perhaps most audacious of all is the fact that this has been done before, for eight whole seasons on Fox’s House. There are some very crucial differences between Watson and House, though, including the tone of both shows (mirroring its title character, House tended to be gritty and dark, while Watson is overtly optimistic), but the most explicit difference is that House’s Holmes influences were just that: Influences. Watson, on the other hand, straight-up takes place in a world where Chestnut’s Dr. John Watson went on a bunch of adventures with renowned detective Sherlock Holmes in London. He then returned to the United States to open a clinic after Holmes’ apparent death at the hands of the evil Professor Moriarty, which, as depicted in Doyle’s The Final Problem and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, involved the Reichenbach Falls.
This all works best when the backstory is integral to what’s happening onscreen and isn’t just color, like when it factors into the overarching plot or when Watson imparts some Holmesian lesson. But, at the same time, it is kind of fun to watch run-of-the-mill doctor stuff going on while thinking “Sherlock Holmes existed in this world” or “the guy doing this medical examination presumably met versions of Inspector Lestrade, Woman-with-a-capital-W Irene Adler, and the famously lazy Mycroft Holmes.”
That’s where the audacity comes in: Watson just works so hard to be interesting. There have been decades of medical dramas on TV that didn’t have to jump through this many conceptual hoops, but they’ve rendered the genre pretty dull and formulaic. Watson’s gimmick doesn’t go as hard as it should or could, but it’s a better gimmick than you’ll find in most of its peers – especially since so many are simply “What if there were a doctor who just cared a whole lot?”
There’s a fascinating potential for silliness in Watson, and its early goings contain at least one stand-out moment that might make you leap out of your chair at how impressively deranged it is. While those moments are too few and far between, it does at least always feel like one could pop up out of nowhere and make an episode a whole lot more fun than it was before.
The struggle of Watson is in those moments in between. When it’s just a straightforward doctor show with an emphasis on weird genetic mysteries (Watson’s speciality, apparently), it meets the bare minimum of being compelling, watchable television. This type of thing is popular for a reason, since it presents a dangerous situation and then makes you feel for the person in that situation and then everything works out in the end. The average episode of Watson follows that arc to a T.
Thankfully, Morris Chestnut’s casual magnetism makes the more generic material a little more appealing. He’s a great leading man, as his years on television would attest, and he does bring a sense of playful joy to the role that feels consistent with how Dr. John Watson is often portrayed in the typical Sherlock Holmes story. If he enjoys puzzling out a patient’s ailment so much, it makes sense that he’d throw his old life away so he could hang around with an acerbic English detective (and would then be devastated by that man’s death).
Less successful is virtually everyone else around him. Watson has (for lack of a better term) a House-style team of younger physicians (Eve Harlow, Peter Mark Kendall in a dual role, and Inga Schlingmann) who do most of the medical work, and each one is explicitly a gimmick unto themselves. It’s clever that those gimmicks are actually part of the plot and that everyone is aware they are a gimmick, but it’s clear that some of the characters were designed to carry storylines themselves and others are just there for the quirks of their personalities or backstories. Ritchie Coster also appears as classic Holmes side character Shinwell Johnson, who often feels like he was added to Watson at the last minute to deliver clearer exposition about the larger Holmes-y mythology of it all.
But there’s still that potential for silliness. There always seems to be a chance that Watson will pull the trigger on a ridiculous plot twist or a show-shaking reveal, and then the less-exciting parts will suddenly become Worth It. And if that doesn’t happen in a given episode… well, it might happen in the next one. That’s the weird trick of Watson: It’s not always great, and it’s not always fun, but when it is fun, it makes you want to stick around.
