Sherlock Review

The first two series are as good as popular television gets. A Study in Pink solves a problem nobody had cracked, how to film deduction, by putting the reasoning on screen as text and letting Benedict Cumberbatch move through it at speed. The Reichenbach Fall is a genuinely great hour, built on a villain that Andrew Scott plays as a man bored by his own superiority. Martin Freeman is the load bearing performance, because Watson has to be both the audience and a soldier, and he makes the second thing believable.

Then the show starts admiring itself. The third series prioritizes reaction over plot, the mystery inside the wedding episode is an afterthought, and the fourth abandons detection entirely for a thriller about a secret sibling that plays like a parody of Moffat's worst instincts. Thirteen episodes across seven years is not enough television to survive a collapse that steep. Remembered correctly for its first six hours, which rewired what the format was allowed to look like.