Review: ‘Watson’ owes as much to ‘House’ as to Holmes

When you create a character as perfect as Sherlock Holmes, as Arthur Conan Doyle did in 1887 — and not just one character but also a sidekick chronicler in Dr. Watson — you give the world a template to play off.

CBS has gone back to that well with “Watson.” It moves Holmes’ almost-as-famous physician friend into the spotlight. What we get, more or less, is a warmer, fuzzier version of “House,” the medical drama in which Hugh Laurie was cast as a master detective doctor.

The basics are substantially the same — John Watson (Morris Chestnut), a clinical geneticist, leads a team of young doctors sleuthing their way to the heart of difficult cases, as he fences with an exasperated superior who, in this case, is Watson’s almost ex-wife, Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes).

We meet him at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, running through the woods, shouting “Holmes!” as gunshots explode in the distance. Even those moderately familiar with the canon will know that this is where Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, plunged to their apparent deaths in “The Final Problem.”

But here Watson jumps in after them. He awakens in a Swiss hospital sporting memory loss, attended by an animated East End Londoner named Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), a minor, somewhat criminal character pulled from “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and, in this telling, a sort of third partner in the Holmes gang.

Holmes, Johnson tells Watson once he gets some of his wits back, was rich and has funded a clinic for Watson to run. Six months later, we are in Pittsburgh, and the Holmes Clinic is up and running.

The doctor has lots of business to attend to: He’s still recovering from his fall, treating himself with surreptitiously acquired drugs, while working to cure his patients in sometimes unorthodox, unethical or illegal ways. He’s dragging his feet on a divorce from Mary, who grew tired of him running off to London to play detective whenever Holmes called. And it is soon revealed — to us, not to him — that Moriarty lives.

Like House, Watson has his crew of variably eager young experts/ students/acolytes, each with a specialty.

Identical twins Stephens and Adam Croft (both played by Peter Mark Kendall) are oh so far apart in character: Stephens is a study bug with no social life, the ant to Adam’s easygoing grasshopper. (Adam is also dating Stephens’ ex.) Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann), adopted from China by rich Texans, sports a wide Southern accent. And there’s Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), Holmes’ neurologist.

“We’re doctors and we’re detectives,” Watson tells them. “Mysteries are what we do.” He pronounces Holmes’ famous dictum that once you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is the truth; he must say it a lot, given the kids’ reaction.

“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. These reliably entertaining shows — “Matlock,” “Elsbeth” and “NCIS” — can generate a good bit of tension while remaining pleasant on the whole.