Serialised Sherlock Holmes adaptation which meticulously reproduces all of Arthur Conan Doyle's continuity fuckups, at first seemingly out of excessive concern for fidelity to the source material. Eventually, it's revealed that we're actually looking at a pair of extremely similar parallel universes, each with its own almost-but-not-quite-identical Holmes and Watson duo, played by the same actors.
In the back half of the series, a plot by Time-Travelling Omni-Moriarty threatens both universes, obliging the Holmeses and Watsons of each universe to team up with their counterparts to stop him; the particulars of this portion of the story are such that understanding what the hell is going on critically hinges on the audience's ability to keep track of which nearly-identical Holmes or Watson is which.
The ultimate resolution involves outsmarting Moriarty by having the Watson with the war wound in his leg and the Watson with the war wound in his shoulder secretly switch places, deliberately framed in such a way that, as far as the audience can tell, there was no conceivable opportunity for them to have done so.
After studying three of the greats — Holmes, Poirot, Columbo — I have determined that in order to be a popular fictional detective you MUST be autistic you MUST be a nosy bitch and you MUST have a boybestfriend to bounce your theories off of.
‘But op, what about Columbo? Columbo doesn’t have a boybestfriend!’ You fools. His boybestfriend is the murderer.
I wonder if the Victorians were as fundamentally devastated when they read Sherlock Holmes saying that you never see a sober mans fob watch with scrapes around the wind up keyhole and you'll never see a drunks without them.
I wonder if they ever sleepily remembered to wind up their fob watch and struggled only to think "by god, Mr. Holmes would declare me a drunkard upon seeing this."
Because even now, 9 years later, I STILL think about the fact that Sherlock would call me an alcoholic for missing my charger port.
“He was charming. He was the only actor who played Sherlock Holmes who took the trouble to get in touch with me and to come and see me.
All along, he would ring me up and ask my opinion. Jeremy was trying to do his very best to be faithful to my father’s stories.” (Dame Jean Conan Doyle)