Critic Reviews

Watson uses both time-tested characters and a familiar model, but the show itself never seems tired or overly familiar.

As a free-standing medical mystery series, it has promise. There is quite a bit of nonsense at the outset. .... But for all the tortured setup, the cases addressed by Watson and his team of upstart fellows at the freshly minted Holmes Institute are off the charts, so to speak.

“Watson” has all the hallmarks of a CBS procedural. The network has a taste and a talent for a kind of light serious entertainment in which a likable cast of sometimes difficult characters solve a problem in an hour, while other, darker events percolate underneath.

Watson should be more fun than it is. Still, it has bright spots that are significantly more entertaining than the average entry in this tired genre, largely thanks to star Morris Chestnut’s infectious level of joy and curiosity.

It’s an OK show. It’s a regular show. It epitomizes what you think of when you think of generic network television. This isn’t to say it doesn’t have its charms, Chestnut chief among them. It’s predictable, comfortable, not particularly challenging. .... It’s not going to make you forget the brilliant “Sherlock” or anything, but it’s enjoyable.

While Watson does suffer from how its ensemble is written — partly as a consequence of the narrative being set in the middle of some of these characters' arcs — Morris Chestnut is both a brilliant Dr. Watson and a solid lead. Both he and Aytes’ Dr. Morstan prove to be the most well-written and intriguing characters within the cast.

“Watson” is somewhat lackluster as a Sherlock Holmes remix. It’s a predictable problem when you remove Holmes from the equation.

While Chestnut is more than up to the task, a jumbled pilot and forced Sherlock lore make for an unsteady opening.

The uneasy mix of medical drama and Holmes worship is set to continue. Perhaps it was unreasonable to hope a show in the Sherlock universe might tick off every other main character and ignore the man himself … but it was nice while it lasted.

The medical case in the premiere is pretty dense and sometimes hard to follow but future episodes are more streamlined. Still, it’s not a show you can multitask through and completely grasp what is going on in the medical cases.