Sherlock Holmes has a love child? In TV’s newest Sherlock series, that appears to be the case.
It is the latest gimmick in the long and storied movie and TV history of the great Arthur Conan Doyle detective who has been with us since 1892.
Premiering next month on The CW, “Sherlock & Daughter” has the super-sleuth partnering with an American teen who seeks his help to solve the mystery of her mother’s murder.
The identity of her missing father is also a mystery to this plucky teen, Amelia (played by Blu Grant, seen with David Thewlis as Holmes in the above photo), but she has a hunch it is Holmes himself.
And so, after 133 years, we learn something new about Sherlock Holmes. He possibly has a daughter and he may also have been a deadbeat dad.
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The pending premiere of “Sherlock & Daughter” comes just two months since the premiere of “Watson” on CBS in which Holmes’ erstwhile sidekick Watson is the main attraction. This week, CBS renewed the show for a second season.
Before that, the last Holmes TV show in the annals of the TV Blog was 2021’s “The Irregulars,” about a band of street urchins who Watson recruits to do Holmes’ legwork.
This year’s two new Sherlock shows are a testament to the durability of this fictional detective known around the world.
It is impossible to count the number of TV shows and movies that have sprung from the Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” stories, but luckily, Wikipedia has done the work already.
Including “Sherlock & Daughter,” Wikipedia counts 28 Sherlock TV shows and 58 movies.
Along with Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster (now just “Frankenstein”), Holmes rounds out the Big Three of 19th-century literary characters whose stories have been adapted almost continuously for movies and TV shows.
Wikipedia lists more than 110 Dracula movies, but far fewer TV shows in which a Dracula-like character has appeared (perhaps most notably in “The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone”).
The movie champion among the Big Three is Frankenstein, with 187 movies, according to Wikipedia.
By contrast, the famed monster from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein” has appeared in comparatively few TV shows. Wikipedia even counts “The Munsters” among them, although this is debatable.
Of the three characters, Sherlock Holmes turns up on TV far more than the other two.
With that in mind, the TV Blog promises to revisit “Sherlock & Daughter” closer to its premiere date of April 16.