'The Irregulars' Is The Most Twisted Sherlock Tale To Date

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle probably didn't realize when he wrote Sherlock Holmes that he'd be setting a formula aped by mystery stories for the next 150 years. But the popularity of the "World's Greatest Detective," combined with backroom dealings of copyright law, made the stories an attractive (and available) franchise. In the last decade alone, there's been everything from Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes blockbuster films to Benedict Cumberbatch's modern Sherlock to the more recent adaptation of the Enola Holmes novels, themselves a middle-grade fiction reimagining of Doyle's characters.

But of all the Holmesian titles, nothing so far has been quite like Netflix's The Irregulars. It is a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that if a new series can be tied back to an already-known title, it has a better chance of getting made. Netflix is known for pulling this exact move before, making films that were initially written as new works and tying them back to things like The Cloverfield Franchise. Sometimes it works; sometimes the connection feels bizarrely tenuous as if the title in question had contorted itself to fit a designated box. The Irregulars somehow does both.

The series uses small-time characters from the Holmes short stories as a jumping-off point. Known as "The Baker Street Irregulars," these (white, male) orphaned street urchins are presented as Holmes' eyes-and-ears network. (It is suggested that Holmes pays the boys handsomely for it, as a sort of semi-charity project.) Their first appearance is in the initial Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, and they turn up again in The Sign of the Four, and then again in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man."