When the actor William Gillette was bringing “Sherlock Holmes,” a play loosely based on the character created by Arthur Conan Doyle, to Broadway in November 1899, he wired a cable to Conan Doyle and asked permission to take creative liberties.
“You may marry him, murder him or do anything you like to him,” Conan Doyle replied — a blessing that Gillette used to add a love interest, furnish Holmes with a pipe and give him a snappy line of original dialogue that would become his catchphrase: “Elementary, my dear Mr. Watson.”
Now, the creators of “Young Sherlock,” which comes to Prime Video on Wednesday, are using a similarly liberal approach to tell the story of the famous detective’s wayward adolescence. This time, as a charismatic 19-year-old with a strong jaw and a sly smile, he’s a distinctly Gen Z take on the consulting detective — a teenage heartthrob caught between the frat house and 221B Baker Street.
Its style, tone and attitude are brassy and jocular, full of fast-moving fight scenes and irreverent one-liners. In that, it bears a strong resemblance to the two “Sherlock Holmes” movies made by Guy Ritchie — who also produced and directed this new show.
“Guy’s incredibly unique,” Matthew Parkhill, the “Young Sherlock” writer and showrunner, said in an interview. “The idea going into this was to try to capture the attitude of his Sherlock movies.”
Parkhill said that when the co-executive producer Simon Maxwell first approached him about the project, it was billed as an adaptation of “Young Sherlock Holmes,” an eight-installment series of young adult novels by Andrew Lane.
Although Parkhill enjoyed Lane’s books about a 14-year-old Holmes solving crimes in 19th-century England, the showrunner felt drawn to the older and savvier Sherlock of Conan-Doyle’s stories, one who fistfights in prison yards and navigates complex family dynamics.
“It’s nothing against the books, which I loved reading,” Parkhill said. “But I just didn’t know what to do with a 14-year-old schoolboy — so I went in a different direction.”
The series, whose star-packed cast includes Colin Firth and Natasha McElhone, is still billed as based on Lane’s novels. But Parkhill abandoned nearly everything in them, working up a new story about Sherlock’s knockabout youth. We see the young detective in and out of trouble as a porter at the University of Oxford, spending his time both solving mysteries and causing mischief.
The show’s boldest departure from both Lane’s and Conan Doyle’s books is turning Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty into his mate and partner in (solving) crime, who goes by James in the show and is played by Dónal Finn.
“I was very interested in this sort of Butch-Sundance relationship between them,” Parkhill explained. “Obviously the audience knows where it’s going to end up. So you get the deliciousness of being able to use that to create tension and use that dramatic irony. That’s a lot of fun to play with.”
Playing the junior Holmes is Hero Fiennes Tiffin, who was on vacation in Thailand when the offer came in to try out for the part. He was so eager, he recalled recently, that he shimmied out of his bathing suit and threw on something “a little more Sherlockian,” then gave everything to an audition over Zoom.
After being cast, he said, was delighted to learn that Joseph Fiennes — Fiennes Tiffin’s uncle on his mother’s side — had joined the cast.
“It’s nice, in a very jokey way, to say that he got that role because of me,” Fiennes Tiffin said. “Matthew said that they hired Joe and only then realized that he was my uncle, but I don’t believe that for a second.” (As it happens, Fiennes plays Sherlock’s uncle in the show.)
Fiennes Tiffin knew Ritchie’s sensibility well, having worked with him previously in the World War II action comedy “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”
On their first day shooting that film together, Fiennes Tiffin said, his character was set to have a gunfight with some Nazi soldiers. The actor put himself in the mind of the character: frightened, but harnessing that fear to find strength. After the first take, Ritchie approached with notes.
“Hero, Hero, Hero,” he advised, according to the actor. “Do it again, but just be more cool this time.”
They did another take, Fiennes Tiffin said: Ritchie approached once more, saying, “Let’s do it again, but even more cool.”
“I went from this complex, layered performance to just, like, shooting from the hip,” Fiennes Tiffin said with a laugh. “When you work with Guy, you know it’s going to be cool.”
Ritchie’s notes on the “Young Sherlock” shoot were similar. Often, Fiennes Tiffin said, the director would stop a scene to admonish him not to be so earnest. The more heartfelt material was Parkhill’s contribution, whereas “the fight scenes, the funny comments and that kind of main character energy where they know they’re the main character” came from Ritchie, the actor said.
Asked whether that breakdown of their contributions was accurate, Parkhill nodded and grinned.
“Ah,” he said. “So Hero is basically saying I’m very uncool.”
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