Young Sherlock tells the story from a 19-year-old Sherlock Holmes' point of view. Played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Holmes finds himself entangled in a murder at Oxford that jeopardizes his freedom. His first case, tackled recklessly, leads him to uncover a far-reaching conspiracy that alters his path forever.
In an interview with ScreenRant's Liam Crowley ahead of the show's season one premiere, showrunner Matthew Parkhill shared how he worked with Ritchie to get "inside" Holmes' head, and unpack that detective brain of his in an "old school way."
Matthew Parkhill: For me, and I talked to Guy about this, you look at the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock, and when they went dramatized his imagination, it was very VFX heavy, because at the time they were shooting, that was all very new. But you're in a time now, where there's just so much VFX, and we were very interested in the idea of doing it in a sort of analog way. So we do it in a very old school way. Almost all of that mind palacing is in-camera. There's some VFX, but most of it is just the old school way of: you're shooting over the shoulder of someone who's not Hero, and you think it's Hero, and Hero walks into the shot. So we tried to do it in a very analog way, and we also tried to do it in a way that doesn't have rules. So sometimes, you'll go into it through a whip pan, sometimes you're going through a click.
For both Parkhill and Ritchie, differentiating these scenes was important, with an effort made to keep the audience "on their toes" by using that mix of special effects and creative camera work.
Matthew Parkhill: I felt like if you do it the same way every time, the audience will get bored, they'll know what to expect. So you kind of want to keep them on their toes. There are times that happens where you're like, "Wait, what's happening?" And then it takes you a couple of seconds to catch up. And that was something we extended, as well, through the rest of the VFX. In certain episodes, you get into very, sort of, pencil-drawn animation. So it was almost like, "What would VFX look like in 1871?," was sort of the idea, the concept we talked about with the VFX people.
At the start, however, the team did take a VFX-heavy approach to telling Holmes' story, ultimately scrapping it for something Parkhill called "incredibly simple."
Matthew Parkhill: We started out doing way more effects. We were going to shoot it on anamorphic lenses, and we did these tests, and were we going to do this, and then we're going to do that. And then we reduced it in post, and less and less and less and less and less, until ultimately, what we ended up with is something incredibly simple.
The show, which is adapted from the Young Sherlock Holmes book series by Andrew Lane, rather than the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tales, turns the focus to Holmes' youth, telling a new story that turns some of the long-held tropes on their head, like turning his future nemesis, James Mortiarty, into his close friend and ally.
And while Ritchie has worked on a few films about the famed detective — starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, respectively — Parkhill made clear to ScreenRant, that Young Sherlock is in no way "a prequel" to Ritchie's previous Sherlock Holmes adaptations.
Matthew Parkhill: It's not a prequel. And it was a conversation Guy and I had very, very early on. Guy was already involved when I came onboard. And one of our first conversations was this has to be ... He doesn't grow up to be Robert Downey Jr. We just wanted to make something that lived in its own world, lived in its own space.
Young Sherlock premieres March 4 on Amazon Prime Video.
Release Date
March 4, 2026
Network
Prime Video
Showrunner
Matthew Parkhill
-
Hero Fiennes Tiffin
Sherlock Holmes
-
Zine Tseng
Princess Gulun Shou’an
English (US) ·