‘Watson’ Review: CBS’ Sherlock-Inspired Medical Drama Is Definitely No ‘House’
At first glance, CBS’ Watson might call to mind Max’s The Pitt, this month’s other Pittsburgh-set series about a doctor reeling from the death of his best friend and mentor.
Or maybe it evokes Fox’s similarly recent Doc, with which it shares a bizarrely specific “physician with traumatic brain injury resumes work at a hospital run by a chief of medicine who just so happens to be the ex they’re still inconveniently in love with” premise.
Look further back, and you’ll also surely note the strong similarity to Fox’s House, the original Sherlock Holmes-inspired medical broadcast drama about a brilliant but eccentric doctor solving medical mysteries with a select group of attractive younger protégés.
What Watson did not remind me of, at least in its first five episodes, was itself, because it does not seem sure what that “self” is to begin with. Despite a promisingly goofy premise and the occasional gobsmacking narrative choice, the early installments speak more to a series struggling to pick a lane than one that’s confident blazing a path of its own.
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As the title indicates, the show follows not the famed detective Sherlock Holmes but his eternal sidekick, John Watson (Morris Chestnut). For all intents and purposes, though, this John Watson is basically just another Sherlock Holmes type: a little cold but ultimately caring, righteous but maddeningly stubborn, so obviously a genius that everyone constantly talks about what a genius he is. Creator Craig Sweeny (whose earlier credits include Elementary, CBS’ much more successful “modern Sherlock Holmes” adaptation) goes ahead and makes the comparison explicit. “Suppose you could say you’re my Sherlock now,” says Shinwell (Ritchie Coster), the stereotypically Cockney-accented tough who used to be Sherlock’s helper and is now Watson’s.
Their Sherlock has apparently been killed in the opening prologue, a foot chase that ends with him, Watson and their shadowy nemesis Moriarty taking a tumble down a waterfall. The only confirmed survivor, Watson takes the opportunity to return to his first calling, medicine. With money left to him by his former mentor, Watson opens a brand-new clinic specializing in genetics and rare diseases, under the watchful eye of Mary (Rochelle Aytes), the wife he’s not quite ready to divorce.
But he remains dogged by hazy memories of Moriarty who, unbeknownst to Watson, not only remains alive but has continued actively working to sabotage him. Moriarty’s premiere-ending cameo is the first indication that Watson might not have any idea what kind of show it wants to be. It’s not simply that the casting, which I am not allowed to reveal, feels hilariously out of left field. It’s that the entire performance feels pitched toward a stranger, maybe funnier show than the silly but mostly straight-faced drama we’ve gotten so far. Lest you get your hopes up that that this heralds an exciting new direction, though, I’ll tell you right now that the character has not reappeared since.
The characters we do get to spend time with make less of an impression. Among Watson’s squad are identical twins Adam and Stephens; Peter Mark Kendall plays both, and while he’s fine as the athletic and outgoing Adam, he so badly overshoots Stephens’ nerdy introversion that he comes off like a serial killer. The actual cold-blooded one is compulsive liar and ruthless manipulator Ingrid (Eve Harlow), but Watson is already on its way to softening her by the fourth or fifth episode.
The designated nice one is Sasha (Inga Schlingmann), a Chinese adoptee turned Texan sweetheart. Along with the others, she speculates that she’s been chosen by Watson as “a living test of nature versus nurture.” Which could be interesting, I guess, except that it never comes up again after the first hour.
As for Watson himself, a great deal of effort is spent detailing his backstory — over the first three installments, he monologues it to three different patients. Far less has gone into defining his personality. Sometimes he’s prickly or reckless or jealous in ways we’re meant to find endearing. Sometimes he’s all those things in ways we’re meant to find worrying. You’ll know the difference because other people will tell him they’re worried about his change in behavior, not because you’ll know him well enough to know what is or isn’t normal for him. That Chestnut nevertheless remains blandly likable might actually be a liability. Both his performance and the writing are geared toward making sure we like Watson, not making sure we understand him.
To that end, Watson paints nearly everything its protagonist does as heroic, occasionally to an unsettling degree. As befits the show’s inspiration, there are some intricate medical mysteries — the most plainly amusing involves a Revolutionary War reenactor who comes to believe after a head injury that he truly is the Scottish general he’s been cosplaying as. But the emphasis is just as often on Watson as a moral crusader. This is true even when he crosses obvious boundaries, as when he gives a patient a wildly experimental and definitely not legal treatment to cure a chronic disease.
His reasoning is that true immorality would be letting details like “patent law” and “red tape” and “lack of clinical trials” get in the way of fixing someone’s pain. The argument might be sound, but the brashness with which he makes it suggests the sort of psychology that Dr. Death seasons are made of. Not that there’s much chance of anything going too sour anyway, though, since Watson is set in an adorably simplistic universe where a strongly worded letter might be all it takes to overturn a years-old conviction on behalf of a patient’s family member.
Watson does not appear to know from moment to moment whether it wants to be a propulsive thriller or a heartwarming doctor drama, a quirky mystery or a commentary on the broken medical system — much less how to combine all those disparate goals into a single coherent whole. The one thing it is certain of is that it means to be a show you turn to because it’s satisfying to watch a smart, noble man solve puzzles and save the day, not because you’re expecting any gritty resemblance to the real world. Such escapism can have its pleasures. But it usually works better when the world we’re escaping to feels more consistently interesting than the one we’re leaving.
