From The Irregulars to Enola Holmes, Netflix keeps sidelining Sherlock Holmes

Slate

"The Sherlock Holmes of The Irregulars is so different from the original character that he’s Holmes in name only," says Laura Miller. "The ascetic, single-minded, anti-social detecting machine of Conan Doyle’s fiction becomes, when played by The Irregulars’s Henry Lloyd-Hughes, a smooth-talking showboater with a topknot and an 8 o’clock shadow who, in his heyday, loved nothing more than taking a bow on a music hall stage or drunkenly tattooing his friends. By the time the series takes place, his celebrated feats of deduction, by which the original Holmes was able to conclude much information about an individual by observing tiny details of his appearance, usually go wrong. And like all of the adults in The Irregulars, this Holmes is weak, untrustworthy, and unreliable, a perpetual failure and disappointment in the eyes of the teenage heroes."