Watson “Pilot”
Created and written by Craig Sweeny
Directed by Larry Teng
Airs Sunday nights on CBS beginning 2/16
CBS’s Watson follows The Pitt and Doc as new medical dramas whose leads have Mysterious Flashback Traumas, which seems to be the running theme for the genre to kick off 2025. However, while The Pitt might feel like a continuation of a familiar property (so much there’s a lawsuit about it), neither it nor Doc find themselves directly tethered to one of the most popular literary series in history, as Watson does. Yes, it is as strange as it sounds: Watson is a medical drama about Sherlock Holmes’s iconic sidekick (played by network stalwart Morris Chestnut) set at a Pittsburgh diagnostic clinic, a series that, for most of its running time, feels like an abstract repurposing of someone else’s show into the world of Holmes, Watson, Shinwell, and Mary Morstan (who, twist – is divorced from Watson!), utilizing a set of characters that may only be familiar to an extremely niche audience, to fit into a (mostly) run-of-the-mill world of medical mysteries and interpersonal drama.
However, Watson‘s pilot (and a few elements of future episodes) holds a few twinkles of promise in its opening and closing acts, suggestions that while it might struggle to find its footing as a series leading with its trite medical and interpersonal conflict, there’s potential for a more adventurous, thoughtful show under the surface begging to come out.
Watson is set six months after Holmes, Moriarty, and Watson all jump off a cliff, guns and biceps ablazing; as Watson tries to recover his life in a world without his now-deceased friend, “Pilot” quickly fills in a world and set of circumstances to give him something to do on this side of the pond. After a loud, goofy action sequence to open the first episode, Watson immediately falls into the rhythms of a well-worn medical drama; there’s a pregnant patient with a medical mystery, characters with entangled romantic histories – and oddly enough, random moments of reflection where “Pilot” reminds the audience that yes, this is a series about Sherlock Holmes’s frickin’ sidekick getting back to his medical roots (with a clinic posthumously built and named by Holmes, of course).
There’s a new, ‘weird’ neurologist, twins with predictably conflicting personalities (both played by Girls‘ Peter Mark Kendall, in what is a curiously watchable and unnecessary feature of the series), and romantic conflict amongst the executives of the clinic… the middle twenty minutes of Watson are thoroughly unremarkable, notable only for how the show’s medical system exists outside of reality, where people can do things on a whim and spend countless hours and unseen amounts of budget to solve the world’s most inexplicably complicated medical cases (this one involves a fatal insomniac disease, septic shock, a laughably brief discussion about fetus viability, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg for the episode’s ONE case). At being a medical drama, Watson is as color by numbers as it can be; but whenever it backs away from those moments in “Pilot” to start to introduce nuance into its characters, it quickly becomes a more watchable series.
Anytime Watson is not in front of x-rays, it’s a perfectly watchable series; Watson and Shinwell reminiscing in car rides about their old friend, the obvious overarching story about a group of randos (and a set of twins) coming together as a group finding purpose in their shared identity, Watson going through the process of healing from his injuries and rediscovering purpose in his life… though the IP-encrusted avenue through which Watson introduces these stories is hilariously stupid, there are inklings of a show that’s a little bit more dramatic, a little bit more careful about its approach to exploring medicine from a theoretical, investigative angle – and a lot more ridiculous with its overarching story, which there are hints of in the episode’s final minutes (which, spoiler, features a cameo from Randall freaking Park as Moriarty, though his introduction involves some complicating factors with Shinwell the series doesn’t need).
The more Watson focuses on tired details of its well-worn universe and predictably unpredictable case of the week stories, the less interesting a series it is. And while it’s probably never going to really loosen itself and embrace the Limitless of itself in the ways that would make it memorable, the beginning and end of Watson are just ludicrous enough that the entire hour doesn’t feel like a complete loss. In those very brief moments, one can feel Watson trying to break away from its own premise a little bit, maybe to a series that spends more time outside the hospital than in it – though this would require it to pull back on some of the substories it wants to have with its side characters, though I’d argue most of them are forgettable enough it would be worth it.
“Pilot” is a little too overcomplicated and insecure about itself as a first episode to really indulge in some of the more unsettling, reflective moments it flirts with at points in its first hour, which keeps the pilot from really reaching its dramatic or emotional potential – it also over-dialogues anything medical or meaningful, leaning on some really sophomoric writing when it goes for deeper emotional moments between the main cast. And yet, in spite of itself, one can see the blueprint for a solid series in this show’s first attempt at assembling its many strange elements; time will tell whether it can find that among pages and pages of medical mumbo-jumbo dialogue, but I’ll certainly be checking back in occasionally to find out where it goes.