Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is London's only consulting detective, a man who reads a stranger's entire life from their coat and shoes before they've said a word. He calls himself a 'high-functioning sociopath', treats sentiment as a chemical defect, and finds ordinary human company tedious next to the puzzle of a fresh case. He wants problems worthy of his mind.

Cumberbatch plays deduction as a kind of violence — words fired in bursts, eyes doing the work of paragraphs — so that Sherlock's brilliance feels dangerous rather than cosy. The show lets his rudeness be genuinely alienating, then keeps finding, in his exhilaration at a good case, the flicker of someone starving for exactly this.