Forget about Batman, James Bond, and Luke Skywalker: Pop culture’s favorite hero is Sherlock Holmes. Seventy-five different actors have played him in the movies and countless more on TV, not to mention all the Sherlockian knockoffs, from the smirking Mentalist to stone-faced Mr. Spock, who once referred to Holmes as his ancestor. Yet in over a century, there’s never been a more enjoyable version of the character than on Sherlock, the BBC series that ingeniously transposes the adventures of Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman) to the present-day London of smartphones and tabloid TV—Watson chronicles their adventures on his blog. As the show begins its superb second series on PBS (be sure to watch the series one cliff-hanger first), it has gone from cultish English hit to international sensation, raved about by the likes of Steven Spielberg.
It’s easy to understand the enthusiasm. Everything about Sherlock clicks, from the nifty graphic tricks showing us how Holmes picks up clues, to the witty design of the duo’s bachelor flat at 221B Baker Street, to the rousing score by David Arnold and Michael Price, which keeps the show charging forward. Although the first and third episodes are better than the second (“The Hounds of Baskerville”), the series is wonderfully cast throughout. Even as Rupert Graves brings a lilting sobriety to Inspector Lestrade, who grasps that Holmes may be a pain but a pain with genius, Una Stubbs is hilarious as 221B’s landlord, Mrs. Hudson, who seems less long-suffering in the face of Holmes and Watson’s antics than amused at seeing what her boys are playing at. And the show’s creators, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (splendid as Holmes’s brother Mycroft), have scored a coup with the two most important intruders into the Holmesian universe. As dominatrix Irene Adler, the one great love of Sherlock’s life, Lara Pulver is sharp, alluring, vulnerable, scheming—foxy in every sense. And Irish actor Andrew Scott is eerily riveting in his portrait of Holmes’s intellectual coequal and archenemy, Jim Moriarty, whose style is so unpredictably weird he unsettles even Holmes.
Of course, I can’t forget the show’s stars, who are both destined to be world famous this time next year. Where Dr. Watson usually comes off as a bit of a dullard, Freeman—the lead in **Peter Jackson’**s upcoming movie adaptation of The Hobbit—makes him a smart, brave everyman who’s unafraid to tell Sherlock off and only slightly abashed when people think the two are actually lovers. Watson is, as ever, our surrogate, and thanks to Freeman we’re not embarrassed to be like him. As for Cumberbatch, both a villain in the Star Trek sequel and the 2012 winner of the Olivier Award for Best Actor on the London stage, he plays Holmes as a petulant schoolboy goaded by brilliance—and boredom. It’s a performance that has gotten “Cumby” idolized by women from Tottenham to Taipei, who follow his every public move like a pride of leopards. And why not? Sonorous of voice and infectiously restless, Cumberbatch is the greatest Sherlock Holmes of all time, a feat that’s anything but elementary.
Episode one of series two of Sherlock airs Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on Masterpiece Mystery! on PBS.