Young Sherlock: Guy Ritchie goes back to the same well for a trifle origin series

Guy Ritchie is famously focused in his interests of gangsters and do-gooders who can’t seem to do good without a generous lashing of smarm. But it’s still surprising that the English director would go back to almost the exact same well.

Having already made two Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movies, in 2009 and 2011, he clearly decided he wasn’t yet done with Britain’s most famous detective (OK, maybe one of Britain’s three most famous detectives).

Ritchie didn’t create Young Sherlock but is an executive producer and established the tone and style by directing the first two episodes.

The show still has some of his signature tropes – more eye-rolling fisticuffs than is necessary for either the plotting or the character development – but it is remarkably, relatively restrained for a Ritchie effort. Which is to say, that you might actually want to stick around.

Ritchie might be consistent in his style and subject pre-occupations, but his work is not in quality. Young Sherlock sits somewhere in the middle, maybe because TV is a writer’s medium.

The series was adapted from books by Andrew Lane as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, and recasts Sherlock as a young man at Oxford University.

Barely an adult, this Sherlock (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) can be a little hot-headed and undisciplined, less of an armchair detective and more of a punch-thrower. Imprisoned for a minor crime, he’s busted out by brother Mycroft’s (Max Irons) government connections.

Mycroft is not yet the mysterious puppetmaster he will become but he still has some game – plus, it’s interesting to watch him have to juggle Sherlock’s shenanigans with his own career ambitions.

Mycroft organises for Sherlock to be posted to Oxford where he is, not a student, but a porter in the dormitories and offices. There, he meets a young Irish scholarship student named James Moriarty (Donal Finn).

If you know your Holmes lore, or even if you just know your Benedict Cumberbatch lore, you know that Moriarty is Sherlock’s grand nemesis, locked in a battle of wits and plots, leading to both their ultimate downfalls.

It’s an interesting choice to reframe the Sherlock/Moriarty relationship as one that began in friendship, as two young men who are yet to be boxed in by the world, and who are still trying to figure out who they are and how they might fit in it.

In this show, Moriarty then serves as something of a John Watson stand-in, but they are equals in intellect and even, to a degree, temperament. The contention here then is that Sherlock and Moriarty are not two sides of the same coin but the same side of a coin.

Throughout the eight episodes, there are signals, a few lines of dialogue here and there, a few glances, some actions, of the path Moriarty will eventually choose.

To that end, he’s almost the more compelling character because we know how it ends, and how he gets there is more interesting than Sherlock’s comparatively straight line.

As far as the story goes, it’s centred on a conspiracy involving Oxford professors targeted for death, which involves a Chinese princess (Zine Tseng) and an uppity lord who’s behind a science institute (Colin Firth).

We also delve into Sherlock’s family history, a departure from Conan Doyle’s canon in which they’re neither named or introduced.

In Young Sherlock, his mother is Cordelia (Natascha McElhone) and she has been institutionalised since the death of her daughter Beatrice (also an invention although the Cumberbatch series had a sister too), and his father Silas (Joseph Fiennes, uncle of Hero) has been gallivanting about abroad ever since.

That side of the story is supposed to be an emotional pull but it ends up mostly being one that more serves the plot because, obviously, everything is going to connect.

The plotting is too convoluted and dragged out - you’ll figure it out well before the characters do – so it really could’ve benefitted from a more judicious episode count.

But the production design, while a little slick for the era, and the energy is satisfying enough that you might just find yourself rolling from one episode to another without thinking about it too much. Perhaps that’s why Prime has opted to release the whole season at once.

It may not be one of the better Sherlock Holmes adaptations but it is one of the better more recent Ritchie projects. It’s a trifle but if you know that going in, it can be an enjoyable confection.

Young Sherlock is streaming on Prime Video