Revisiting the world of Sherlock Holmes is a familiar strategy, but «Young Sherlock», from Prime Video, attempts something slightly different: to portray genius before it learns restraint.
In «Young Sherlock», Sherlock Holmes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) appears far removed from the methodical figure audiences associate with Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective. Here, he is nineteen and living in Oxford as a servant when a murder case places him at the centre of an investigation that threatens his own freedom. Forced to prove his innocence, the young student begins to follow clues that quickly extend beyond a single crime, uncovering a wider conspiracy and marking what the series presents as his first major case. Inspired by Andrew Lane’s “Young Sherlock Holmes” novels, the production uses this premise to imagine an original origin story for the detective.
From there, «Young Sherlock» unfolds as a coming-of-age narrative. The protagonist is not yet the unflappable observer popularised by tradition, but an impulsive, occasionally reckless young man whose intelligence operates more as instinct than method. The TV series is particularly interested in this transitional moment, when deductive abilities are already present but not yet tempered by the discipline and detachment that will later define the character.
This process of formation gains further resonance when Sherlock encounters James Moriarty (Dónal Finn). Here, the character does not yet appear as the legendary adversary of the canonical stories, but as an unlikely ally, a young man of comparable brilliance whose intellect rivals that of the protagonist. Their dynamic introduces a compelling tension: they begin as partners in investigation, united by intellectual curiosity and a shared inclination to challenge established rules.
It is within this relationship that «Young Sherlock» finds one of its most stimulating ideas. By bringing Holmes and Moriarty together at this early stage of their lives, the series suggests that the very qualities that draw them together—intelligence, ambition, and a capacity for manipulation—are also those that will ultimately place them on opposing sides. The result is a relationship marked by complicity, yet threaded from the outset with hints of latent rivalry.
This narrative choice provides the series with a clear dramatic axis, while also shaping the development of its central mystery. «Young Sherlock» oscillates between a coming-of-age story and a conspiratorial thriller, gradually expanding the scale of the initial investigation. The plot accumulates clues, suspects, and reversals in an effort to sustain momentum and a persistent sense of danger around its protagonist.
At the same time, the series situates this journey within a broader visual and narrative framework. The Oxford depicted in «Young Sherlock» emerges as both an academic and shadowed space, where secret societies, rivalries, and concealed interests feed into the central mystery. This setting lends the narrative an almost initiatory dimension: more than solving a crime, Sherlock appears to be undergoing a series of trials that will shape how he comes to understand the world.
Even so, the show’s primary interest lies less in the resolution of the mystery than in the gradual construction of its central figure. «Young Sherlock» functions above all as an attempt to fill the space before the myth, the moment when Holmes’s extraordinary talent begins to take form but has not yet crystallised into the methodical and distant figure familiar from literature and film.