For Fans of Sherlock

Cumberbatch gets the headlines and deserves them. But Martin Freeman's Watson is the reason Sherlock works at all. A lesser show gives Watson the role of straight man and leaves him there. This version gives him agency, moral courage, and a very specific kind of grief that accumulates across the series. He is the human scale against which Holmes's brilliance becomes legible. Without Freeman grounding every scene he is in, the show would be a very stylish parlor trick.

Andrew Scott's Jim Moriarty is one of the great television antagonists, and the reason is structural: he is not trying to beat Holmes, he is trying to seduce him. Moriarty's argument, across every scene they share, is that Holmes is just like him. That the gap between a consulting detective and a consulting criminal is thinner than Watson would ever believe. The show never fully resolves whether that argument is wrong.

A lot of people assume the original Doyle stories will feel thin after the BBC adaptation's production values and psychological complexity. The opposite is true. The Adventures and Memoirs in particular are extraordinarily efficient: character, plot, and atmosphere packed into twenty pages. Doyle had a genius for the telling detail, and the canonical Holmes is stranger and funnier than either screen version has quite managed to capture.

Most detective games let you find clues and click the right answer. Disco Elysium asks you to construct an interpretation of events from unreliable evidence, contradictory witnesses, and your own cognitive biases. That is much closer to how Holmesian deduction actually works on the page. The political setting and pitch-black comedy also share the BBC series' willingness to be genuinely unsettling underneath the genre pleasures.