First Impressions: Sherlock & Daughter (The CW)

Sherlock & Daughter “The Challenge”
Created and written by Brendan Foley
Directed by Bryn Higgins
Airs Wednesdays on The CW

Sherlock & Daughter is not just the second Sherlock Holmes interpretation we’ve seen in the first quarter of 2025 (alongside CBS’s middling, if affably batshit insane Watson), it’s another important building block in The CW’s attempts to redefine itself as a creative brand in the burgeoning post-Arrowverse and Riverdale age. And at first glance, it might seem easy to write of Sherlock & Daughter‘s uneven pilot episode off as just another forgettable, budget-friendly drama – however, “The Challenge” holds just enough charm in its swirling mixture of period piece, murder mystery, and conspiracy thriller, that it slowly begins to blossom in its third act, as its attention shifts from a series of awkward introductions, to a rather effervescent, intriguing dramedy, highlighted by the performances of David Thewlis and Blu Hunt as the show’s titular leads.

There are certainly some rough edges to the first hour of Sherlock & Daughter, the brunt of which is borne by the first act of “The Challenge”, which struggles a bit to juggle the competing introductions of its two leads. We first meet Sherlock Holmes in 1896 London, where everybody’s kid keeps getting kidnapped, and the inquisitive, particularly bitter Holmes keeps finding little pieces of red ribbon that send him running in the other direction.

Thewlis, as an older and more bitter version of Holmes, brings a big, theatrical performance to the heart of the series, an energetic portrayal that really helps energize the show’s setting and its characters. His Holmes’ is aged, resigned, hyperbolic, and incredibly self-righteous; he berates his maid for his overcooked egg, and is more than welcome to show off his inquisitive detective skills, with an ingenious little sequence showing just how many details he can perceive at any given time. It’s a great portrayal of someone whose genius has been indulged for way, way too long – which Sherlock & Daughter neither excuses or scolds for, allowing Thewlis’s Holmes to exist as he is, occasionally reflecting on the space the great detective has created between himself and the world around him – and more interestingly, how that’s been defined by the mysterious circumstances swirling around him.

As Sherlock contends with every crime scene he investigates containing a red piece of thread that immediately scares him off – perhaps something to do with his recently murdered housemaid, occurring a few weeks before the pilot begins – Sherlock & Daughter introduces us to the other half of its premise, which is where the series begins to find its stride a bit. Hunt plays Amelia Rojas, daughter of a Native American who arrives in London to find her way to Baker Street, in order to find the celebrity detective her mother posthumously told her was her father, to convince him to help solve her mother’s murder.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that could easily come across as nothing but a 19th century Odd Couple adaptation; but centered on the careful, optimistic Amelia as she’s thrown into an incredibly goofy plot to collide her path with Sherlock’s (she stumbles into the backdoor of his home, where she’s immediately hired as a low-level servant in his mansion), “The Challenge” finds a bit of a charming voice in fits and stumbles, especially as the two coalesce on a family (featuring Banshee‘s Ivana Miličević as the mother), where the son of a US ambassador has gone missing, and we see Sherlock and Amelia’s intuitions begin to find their voice.

(I’m also interested to see if Amelia’s Native background is anything the series engages with other than tokenism, which is mostly what it amounts to in the pilot).

There are still some rough edges for Sherlock & Daughter to smooth out, of course; its investigative moments are fairly bit by-the-numbers in this first hour, and its nascent attempts at humor and internal pathos are equally undercooked, but the first hour ends in such an interesting place – a Holmes, thoroughly unconvinced of his parentage, taking in Amelia so he can continue to do his investigate work vicariously though her, using her as an entry way into the investigations shut off to him by whomever is leaving those threatening scarlet thread around London’s crime scenes (or in one case, his mailbox, with a woman’s finger attached to it).

It also employs multiple unnecessary visual elements, in what feels like a lack of conviction in its delivery; as if a nod to other, more prominent modern adaptations, there must be a visual component to Sherlock’s big investigative moments – except here it’s just plain text dropped onto the screen, in a way that make those moments feel like poorly-colored Powerpoint slides. While it fits neatly in alongside the episode’s other attempts at artistic panache – in the form of some ugly map visuals and oddly-inserted sketch drawing images in the middle of other scenes – the elements are ultimately unwelcome, cluttering up the more effective bits of tone building and period depiction with mushy, cheap-looking visual elements.

Despite a few unwelcome secondary characteristics, Sherlock & Daughter‘s first hour is a surprisingly pleasant first offering from creator and writer Brendan Foley, especially once Amelia is in London, and her and Sherlock’s awkward alliance begins to take shape and find its rhythms. That momentum is an incredibly encouraging sign, because with only eight hour-long entries in its first season to work with, it would be hard for Sherlock & Daughter to recover from stumbling out of the gate – which is largely avoids, thankfully, smartly leaning on its two stars to ignite the underlying dramatics of their interpersonal dynamic, as it slowly starts to tease out the numerous mysteries and conspiracies at the heart of its story. The more assured Sherlock & Daughter gets in its delivery, the more potential it has to distinguish itself as something more than just quickly-thrown together IP slop; there’s clearly a really good show bubbling right under the surface of “The Challenge”, but there’s also plenty of opportunity for the series to be content with being just another middling, throwaway adaptation of the iconic literary character.

Grade: C+