CBS’s Watson is a formulaic medical mystery

David Shore created one of the most successful medical procedurals ever back in 2004 by reimagining Sherlock Holmes as Gregory House, a brilliant, cantankerous doctor diagnosing mysterious illnesses with the help of a small team of young MDs. CBS’s Watson blatantly rips off House, making the connection to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle explicit in order to weave in a larger mystery but otherwise delivering an extremely formulaic throwback lacking the biting wit that made House great.  

Created by Craig Sweeny, who also worked as a writer on CBS’s earlier Sherlock Holmes procedural Elementary, Watson follows the consulting detective’s partner Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) after the events of Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes and his nemesis Professor James Moriarty seemingly plunged to their deaths. In his will, Holmes leaves Watson the funds to create his own clinic in Pittsburgh (presumably both London and Pennsylvania were too expensive as the show is actually filmed in Vancouver), where he can study a new odd case every week.

The pilot is an absolute mess, laying out the Holmes mythology and then clumsily rushing the introductions of the entire supporting cast and the show’s formula. The dialogue and story beats are all absurdly predictable, too. Watson’s morally ambiguous fixer Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), a minor Holmes character who was also given a larger part in Elementary, reverently mentions that Holmes was the only person who could pull off saying “Eureka!” before adding that maybe there was one other person. (Of course, that’s exactly what Watson says when he cracks the episode’s case.) Then, in Watson’s first of many scenes arguing with medical director Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes), he asks if her problem is with him professionally or as his ex-wife. And when trying to console an anxious patient, Watson basically gives her his whole backstory.

Chestnut does a solid job with the material he’s given, portraying a character usually relegated to a sidekick as much more like Holmes himself, perpetually confident in his own abilities even as he self-medicates for the traumatic brain injury he sustained while trying to save the famed detective. He’s smug but treats everything as a learning opportunity for his team, giving them reason to seek to impress him and keeping his criticisms relatively benign.

Watson has assembled his crew for their specialist skills and experiences as experimental subjects in their own right, including Stephens and Adam Croft (Peter Mark Kendall), identical twins who had a falling out because they dated the same woman, and immunologist Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann), who was born in China and raised in an affluent suburb of Texas that gifted her a comically thick drawl. The most questionable addition is Watson’s personal neurologist Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), who he suspects is a sociopath. She seems to agree with the diagnosis given that she has the page for antisocial personality disorder bookmarked in her copy of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders. This is not a subtle show.

The characters get just a touch of development each episode, following relatively broad strokes like Stephens being the glasses-wearing workaholic twin jealous of his more easygoing and charming brother. Sasha is the fairly generic nice one, leaving her vulnerable to both being strung along by her boyfriend and manipulated by Ingrid. The episodes are similarly predictable, with cold opens revealing some sort of crisis Watson’s team will have to solve while spewing a prodigious amount of medical jargon. (Each hour typically culminates with an escalation of a condition that requires emergency surgery.) There’s also a touch of classic detective work like tracking down relatives to discover genetic histories or investigating homes for clues about what’s really going on in order to solve the mystery right in the nick of time.

While the show is almost entirely episodic, Watson is slowly creating a puzzle involving Moriarty, who’s played by Randall Park in just a single scene in the first episode. Very little about Watson is revealed in the first five episodes of the series that were made available to critics, beyond that he went to work with Holmes while struggling to reintegrate after returning from war. There are some intriguing hints about who the doctor really is, and while the reveal the show seems to be building towards still isn’t original, it could be a fun twist on a character that’s been reinvented so many times already.

Ironically, Watson shows the most potential when it gets further away from mystery and highlights character-driven stories about seeking humanity in the practice of medicine. Episode four breaks from the formula by having the initial patient die on the operating table, dedicating the rest of the time to Sasha trying to track down the family of her medical-school cadaver who had similar symptoms. Having each character share their memories of the corpses they worked on provides an unusual link to bring them together even as it cements the different ways they view medicine and patients. 

Episode five is the show’s strongest, shaking things up by focusing on someone with chronic illness (in this case, sickle cell anemia) and spurring an ethical debate about allowing people to suffer when treatment is available but financially out of reach. The show has some decent humor, too, courtesy of a sketchy biohacker friend of Watson. But it’s unlikely that Watson will achieve the success of House. That said, if it takes some more risks as the season goes on, it could at least provide some engaging comfort TV. 

Watson premieres January 26 on CBS