Holmes truths
As Sherlock & Daughter sells to broadcasters around the world, DQ hears from stars Blu Hunt and Fiona Glascott, creator Brendan Foley, writer Shelly Goldstein and executive producer Karine Martin about reinventing the iconic sleuth with a mystery relating to his own past.
“There’s a reason there’s been 20,000 Sherlocks – Arthur Conan Doyle created one hell of a character,” says Shelly Goldstein, one of the writers behind Sherlock & Daughter, which features the latest incarnation of the literary sleuth.
In the eight-part series, which debuted earlier this year, David Thewlis dons the iconic deerstalker hat to play Holmes, who is chasing a sinister case that appears to have him beaten. Unable to investigate without endangering his closest friends, the legendary detective is at a loss – until he meets Amelia Rojas (Blu Hunt) in the aftermath of her mother’s mysterious murder. Together, they set out to not just solve the case, but also find out whether, as suspected, Amelia really is Sherlock’s daughter.
With the show coming on the heels of recent Sherlock adaptations starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr and others, executive producer Karine Martin admits she was worried about “Sherlock fatigue” when her Starlings Entertainment company took on the project.
“There have been so many and there have been great Sherlocks,” she says. “Are we going to be able to stand the test? But once the scripts started coming in and once we saw our characters developing, we firmly thought this would really fill a space that hadn’t been taken yet.”
“A Sherlock Holmes story can be a colossal turkey or a work of genius, or anything in between,” says creator, writer and executive producer Brendan Foley (The Man Who Died). “It’s effectively a genre in its own right – a ‘Holmesverse.’ You don’t want to do something that’s a total misfire, but equally it’s a balancing act. You have to be true to the original stories and spirit but also you have to give it something new.”
Sherlock & Daughter has certainly proven to be a hit with viewers since its launch, rating as the number-one series on The CW in the US and the number-two show on its streaming platform. Within 48 hours of going live on HBO Max in the US, it was the number-four show on the app and has remained in the top 10 since then, while SBS in Australia experienced an average 150% increase in total audience share for the first four episodes.
Warner Bros Discovery in the UK and Ireland is also on board the series, which will additionally air in YLE in Finland, NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden, DR in Denmark, RUV in Iceland and Amedia in the CIS region.
Since the show’s launch, distributor Federation International has also sold it to Sky Italia, Bell Media in Canada, RTS in Switzerland, Nova in Greece, Disney in the Balkans, Tiviby in Turkey and TV3 in the Baltics.
Sherlock & Daughter is produced by Starlings TV Distribution through Albion Television, and coproduced by StoryFirst, in association with financiers Krempelwood and MBM3.
Speaking at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival, where Sherlock & Daughter screened in the fiction competition, Foley, Goldstein and Martin joined stars Hunt and Fiona Glascott to reveal more about the inspiration behind the series, casting Thewlis in the lead role and recreating Victorian London in Ireland.
Creating a series about Sherlock Holmes wasn’t something Foley took on lightly, but he quickly decided not to worry about pleasing either the Arthur Conan Doyle “purists” or viewers more familiar with other screen interpretations.
Foley: You can’t always be all things to all people, so we decided that our Sherlock is an absolutely classic Sherlock, but is also a ‘lion in winter.’ He’s an older, grumpier Sherlock than we may have seen, but he is in classic Victorian London and he’s pretty much the classic character. Then we’re able to play with the other side to bring in a younger audience, which is Blu’s character Amelia just landing in London like a spunky meteorite into poor old Holmes’s tidy little world. That seems to have worked very well.
If you’re going to do a Sherlock Holmes project, call David Thewlis.
Martin: We reached out to his agent and he told us, ‘He says no to almost everything, so don’t hold your breath.’ He read the first script and asked for the second – and then he asked for all of them. Very quickly, we got a call back from the agent, who said we were good to go. So we were thrilled.
Goldstein: Before we went into production, David told us that his wife was slightly frustrated because he had taped the pages of the scripts to his walls and all day he just was learning every word. He showed up to the first [script] reading knowing all of his lines for all eight episodes.
Hunt was on board long before Thewlis was cast, having signed on to play Amelia while the show was still being developed.
Hunt: I read for the show, signed on to do it and then it went on pause for like a year, and that was before they had ever even gone to David. A year later, I was just about to do a different show and then they called and were like, ‘We are doing the show. We’re gonna be shooting in three months and now we have David Thewlis attached as Sherlock.’ As soon as I heard ‘David Thewlis,’ I was like, ‘OK, OK, tell the other show no. I’m doing Sherlock now.’
The Another Life and The Originals actor was drawn to the idea of starring in a period series where her character was thrown into the world of Sherlock Holmes.
Hunt: The opportunity to be in Victorian England was really exciting. It’s not something I ever thought I would do. The character of Amelia is fun. She’s very sweet and determined and heroic. And the fight scenes and the horses and the costumes and the hair, all of it, was just like… Ireland was amazing.
Amelia doesn’t just leave the sleuthing to Sherlock; she has skills of her own to offer the detective.
Hunt: You see throughout the show that she has abilities and skills that Sherlock wouldn’t have that helps in the solving. Also, just her being American, they joke in the first episode that Americans ask too many questions and things like that, so just being a bit more outgoing in England, she can go into conversations or find things out in ways that Sherlock just can’t. They definitely play with that a lot in the show.
I always tried to make it so that instead of playing Amelia as a complete opposite to Sherlock, where she’s extremely emotional, extremely empathetic, the absolute opposite of him, by the end of the show, actually, you could see that a lot of her behaviours and habits were maybe more reserved or slightly colder than she would think. She realises she’s actually a lot more like Sherlock.
Hunt’s favourite Sherlock Holmes is now Thewlis.
Hunt: I’m serious. I’m not even kidding. First of all, David is one of the greatest actors to ever live. He makes the show the show, and without David, the show has no legs, really. Maybe that’s a crazy thing to say, but he’s just such an incredible actor; he carries every single thing that he’s in. He was so great to work with.
Glascott (Julia), who plays Lady Violet Somerset, worked with a dialect coach to help her embody a woman characterised by her sharp tongue, but who might hold the key to the titular mystery.
Glascott: She’s not just a villain. She’s a person who’s so frustrated with the fact that, as a woman, even though she’s come from this amazing wealth and affluence, it can be gone in a second because she didn’t marry. That fuels this anger inside. She is an incredibly intelligent person and very much feels she’s an equal to Sherlock, as I think she is too, and finds that all of this builds up inside her to the point where nothing else makes sense except for what she’s going to do.
I loved playing somebody who experiences that rage and lets it all out within the confines of who she is as a person in that time in England. And also, being strapped into a corset, up on high heels, hair on top of your head – all of those things add to each other.
Foley and Goldstein wrote the show with Micah Wright and showrunner James Duff (The Closer, Major Crimes), who was brought in to ensure it could be developed as a potentially long-running series.
Foley: I started working with Starlings and we had the first three or four episodes on the go. Then we brought in James, who comes from that American studio background where you think, ‘Well, how will this story be playing out 73 episodes in?’ We come from a European world where eight episodes is Mount Olympus; or if it’s a BBC [series], it’s four. Just having someone who’s used to projecting story over a long arc, his experience is absolutely invaluable.
Shelly was obviously involved in all aspects. You need male, female, younger, older voices in a group of writers when you’re doing this. We had Micah Wright, who comes from a Native American background. That was fantastic to have in the room so that we were being very respectful to that.
The idea to pair Sherlock with a daughter came “because it would be harder for him.”
Goldstein: It’s a bigger challenge. Amelia is very much her own woman. She’s very much got an American sensibility. She comes from an extraordinarily different culture. And it’s absolutely the last thing he would be prepared to deal with. The best way to tell a story is, ‘What would cause me the most difficulty to figure out?’
Foley: Father-daughter relationships are just fascinating, and Amelia is from a different world, even though they come from the same era. The amazing thing about Blu as a person landing [on set] in Dublin is she was experiencing that same culture shock that Amelia is, one century on. So that’s really important.
Foley has international ambitions if the series returns for a second season.
Foley: The first season has a subtext – the internationalisation of crime. At the end of the 19th century, society is just moving from criminals robbing banks to criminals owning banks. That’s a really interesting thing to explore with those characters. Crime is blissfully international, so I’d like to see what’s happening in America, in Europe and Australia. We’re still with the glorious British Empire, but it’s a big world out there.
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Elementary: Set in New York, this modern-day series stars Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes, a recovering drug addict, with Lucy Liu as Joan Watson.
Jonathan Creek: The creative consultant to a magician attempts to find logic behind a string of increasingly baffling mysteries.
Miss Scarlet & the Duke: A Victorian-era detective drama featuring the titular Miss Scarlet, Eliza, who takes over her father’s detective agency and solves a series of mysteries with The Duke, Detective Inspector William Wellington.
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tagged in: Albion Television, Blu Hunt, Brendan Foley, David Thewlis, Federation International, Fiona Glascott, HBO Max, Karine Martin, Krempelwood, MBM3, Shelly Goldstein, Sherlock & Daughter, Starlings Entertainment, Starlings TV Distribution, StoryFirst, The CW