‘Watson’ Creator On Premiere Twist, Moriarty Casting Reveal & More

SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details from the series premiere of CBS’ drama series Watson.

Five and a half years after the end of Elementary, CBS is returning to the world of Arthur Conan Doyle with Watson, which debuted tonight after the AFC Championship game.

The premiere of the medical drama, which stars Morris Chestnut as the eponymous Sherlock sidekick who leads a team of young doctors in solving medical mysteries, was bookmarked by two scenes right out of the Holmes canon. It kicked off at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls where Holmes and Moriarty fall to their deaths before Watson could come to his friend’s aid in Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem.

While the mystery author eventually revived Holmes, in Watson, it is Moriarty who survives. In the final minutes of the premiere, Randall Park is revealed to be playing the infamous villain as he gets a case of samples from an associate of Holmes and Watson’s, Shinwell Johnson.

In an interview with Deadline, Watson creator Craig Sweeny, who also served as EP on Elementary, spoke about the plot twist and the decision to keep Park’s casting a secret. (The series’ official description already had revealed that it would be following Moriarty and Watson writing “their own chapter” following Holmes’ death at the hands of Moriarty.)

Sweeny revealed why he decided to make Watson a Pittsburgh-based geneticist, with both him and Moriarty American, how much we will see of Moriarty and why he may be interested in Watson’s work as the head of a clinic for rare disorders. Sweeny teased the Moriarty-Watson storyline, two other Sherlock universe characters who will be making an appearance on the show and shared a couple of canon easter eggs planted in Watson’s office.

Additionally, Sweeny spoke about the genesis of the idea for a medical drama about Sherlock’s confidant and Chestnut’s casting in the role, Watson’s internal struggles, the show’s similarities to (and differences from) House and the decision to have two identical twin young doctors played by the same actor, Peter Mark Kendall.

DEADLINE: Why did you decide to pick a version of the Sherlock Holmes universe where he dies in The Final Problem?

SWEENY: I found my way to this particular construction by thinking about a medical show that I might want to do. I didn’t start by thinking about the Holmes universe, I started by thinking about, well, what would be a medical show that I’d like to do that could work on CBS, because I was thinking in terms of a network show; as you probably know, I’ve been under deal with CBS for some time.

It is one of those moments where I was driving and just loosely pondering a medical show, which I’ve always wanted to do. And I said, well, what if you did a show where Watson was a doctor, featuring Watson as the lead, and he’s practicing medicine? I thought, well, surely that’s been done. I got into my office, and to my amazement, it hadn’t been, and that’s what got me thinking.

DEADLINE: Did you say ‘Eureka’ at that moment?

SWEENY (laughs): I didn’t. I didn’t. Does it necessarily need the word itself If you’re having the feeling. I felt eureka, I don’t know if I said it.

DEADLINE: And is Sherlock really dead? We didn’t see a body.

SWEENY: If you have Watson front and center, to allow that character to shine, you definitely don’t want him competing with the most famous character in all of literature, so a very natural construction for me was to begin with the death of Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Now, of course, even in Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock is not truly dead.

My belief is that Holmes is gone. I don’t want to be held to that if there’s some great story that presents itself, but I don’t believe that we’re ever going to feature Sherlock as an ongoing character in the show Watson at this time.

DEADLINE: Well, let’s talk after Season 5 when you’ve run out of ideas…

SWEENY: That’s why I’m hedging, I’m waffling, of course.

DEADLINE: Why did you decide to make both Watson and Moriarty Americans? And in the world of Watson, is Sherlock English or is everyone American?

SWEENY: No, no, Sherlock is British, English, in particular. Moriarty, in spite of what you hear, we don’t really know where he’s from, and he’s a bit of a chameleon. Obviously, the Moriarty you hear in the pilot speaks with an American accent, I wouldn’t say that nails him as from any particular place.

Watson is from the States, from Pittsburgh, and we have a very particular storyline that will demonstrate how he came to be in England, in Sherlock Holmes’ orbit and having those adventures. But yes, the canon happens in London with Sherlock as a British man.

DEADLINE: Why did you want to keep Randall Park’s casting as Moriarty a secret and reveal it at the end of the pilot?

SWEENY: I’m always thinking about what’s the most fun for the audience. I think that we have a strong enough concept to draw crowds to the show anyway and that the idea of seeing Moriarty — but really Randall Park playing Moriarty, which I find to be a really surprising, interesting choice — the idea of that being a surprise and shock was appealing to me.

DEADLINE: How did Randall Park’s casting come about and what was his reaction when he was first approached?

SWEENY: I had a pre-existing relationship with Randall, not a huge one, but enough that I had his number in my phone, and we were friendly. I was getting a lot of interest in the role of Moriarty from great actors, but people who are more traditional villains. And I was just interested in the idea of really inverting his persona, the idea of what if Randall Parks’ affability and smile and his famous and completely genuine niceness were a mask for something much more sinister.

I thought that was a really interesting writing challenge and a really interesting way to present the character of Moriarty and that performer as well. I sent him a text and said, would you want to do that? Obviously, there are negotiations that needed to happen but there was interest right from the get-go, we’re very fortunate. He comes back quite a bit over the course of the season.

DEADLINE: Is he recurring or a series regular?

SWEENY: He’s recurring.

DEADLINE: What is Moriarty’s beef with Watson? I feel like it was always about Moriarty and Sherlock in the books, with Watson largely as a bystander. What does he want from Watson?

SWEENY: I wouldn’t say he has a beef with Watson. I would say that he has an interest in the work that Watson is doing, and that the DNA that they’re collecting at the clinic is something that Moriarty believes he can put to a very particular use. This version of Moriarty I don’t think has a big picture viewpoint, I don’t know that you would see it as a beef with anybody, but he has a keen interest in the work that’s going on at that clinic.

DEADLINE: So these were DNA samples in that case? Were we supposed to figure that out? Shinwell only said “samples”.

SWEENY: I think you’re naturally going to go to the fact that Watson is a geneticist, and Shinwell works at that clinic. We intentionally didn’t connect it fully but yes, those are DNA samples in that case.

DEADLINE: What was with that polo shirt Moriarty was wearing with an Always and Everywhere logo. Does he work for a security company?

SWEENY: This version of Moriarty is always looking to slip effortlessly into the world and not draw eyes to himself. In that moment, he’s just appearing to be a guy on his way to a tech job in Pittsburgh; Google, companies like that, have all set up branches in Pittsburgh. He has a front called Always and Everywhere that is a mock tech company. It’s just his way of moving through the world in a way that doesn’t attract attention.

DEADLINE: What can you tease about the storyline between Moriarty and Watson this season?

SWEENY: Moriarty has an ongoing plan to apply the work Watson is doing in his clinic, specifically the rare DNA that comes in from sick people all over the world, very much to his own ends. It’s a really shocking plan, entirely rooted in actual science, but that feels like science fiction when they know what he’s up to.

Watson’s slow realization that Moriarty survived that fall, that he’s involved with the clinic, and that, in fact, Shinwell is betraying him, it is the overarching, serialized story of our season. So in many ways, although we tell a lot of great cases, what you’ll remember, I believe, primarily from Season 1 is the story of Watson vs. Moriarty and what Moriarty is doing with the DNA from Watson’s clinic.

DEADLINE: Shinwell Johnson is from the books, right? What is his agenda? He seemed very sad over Sherlock’s death and very loyal to him and Watson. And then we see him working with Moriarty. Is that voluntary? Talk about him being the link between those two worlds and those two characters.

SWEENY: Yes, Shinwell Johnson does appear in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. He is a London criminal who reforms himself and informs on developments in the underworld to Sherlock Holmes. So he plays a role a little bit like the Baker Street regulars in that they’re people who can give Holmes intelligence about what’s going on.

A version of Shinwell Johnson appeared on Elementary as well. Our version of Shinwell obviously works very closely with Holmes and comes over to the States with Watson, and he is our touchstone for the world of Sherlock on a week to week basis. He is working with Moriarty, and the first question that Rich Coster, who plays a role, had for me was, Okay, is he doing that by avocation or has he been coerced into doing that? Our version of Shinwell truly loves Watson, truly loves Holmes, but Moriarty has something on him that is forcing him into that relationship.

DEADLINE: Will there be more nods to the Sherlock canon? There is a line in the pilot ,”We are doctors we’re not detectives.” How much are we going to be reminded of the Holmes connection?

SWEENY: It’s primarily a medical show, but the methodology of Sherlock is definitely applied consistently. The enormous influence of Sherlock upon Watson’s life is ever present as well. Yes, they do, at times, find themselves in a criminal situation as well.

The character Lestrade, who is among the Scotland Yard detectives that Holmes works with. In our universe he is a Pittsburgh police detective who is quite fun, and Watson interacts with him throughout the season. We definitely dabble in crime a little more than your typical medical procedural while also being primarily a medical show.

DEADLINE: Any other familiar characters that we are going to see this season?

SWEENY: You will see Irene Adler, who is from the story A Scandal in Bohemia and was famously Sherlock Holmes’ only lover in canon. She comes in for an episode. There are many, many, many easter eggs, even within the pilot. If you pause when you’re in Watson’s office, you can see that it’s filled with totems of Watson’s adventures with Sherlock and nods to the canon.

DEADLINE: Can you mention a couple?

SWEENY: The easiest one to see is, there’s a painting of a horse on the back wall of Watson’s office, right behind the violin that’s displayed there, which is Sherlock’s violin, and that is the horse Silver Blaze from the story Silver Blaze. Also, there are five framed seeds against the black background, which are the five orange pips from one of my favorite stories, The Five Orange Pips. Those are the breadcrumbs I want to lay, and then I would love for audience members to dig in and see what else they can find in there.

DEADLINE: I assume you are a big fan of Conan Doyle’s books, and you probably already had to study them for Elementary. How did your experience on that show prepare you for Watson?

SWEENY: Yes, I’ve loved the Holmes stories since I was a kid when my aunt got me an abridged version The Hound of the Baskervilles to read. Since reading that, I dove in immediately into the canon. When I took on the job of being EP on Elementary, I reread and read everything that I hadn’t; I did a deep dive and really familiarized myself with that world.

That research provided a very comfortable foundation for slipping back into the world. In some ways, it was like putting on a bathrobe that makes you feel very much at home. The challenge was to just not be too comfortable and to be like, Okay, this is a different thing, and you’re not doing exactly what you did there here.

DEADLINE: Why did you decide to go with Pittsburgh and what do you think about the coincidence of two new medical dramas, Watson and The Pitt, both set in Pittsburgh, premiering within days of each other?

SWEENY: That’s always been the way of my career: when I did Medium, there was The Ghost Whisperer, when I did Elementary, there was Sherlock; it’s, really uncanny. I am from Pittsburgh, that’s my hometown, and my mother worked as an administrator in the transplant department at a hospital system called UPMC, which is a loosely analogous to UHOP, which is in our show.

For me, it was just natural. Pittsburgh is a hub of medicine, human transplantation was refined there, polio vaccine was invented there, there is a great hospital system in Pittsburgh that attracts people from all over the region. So I was attracted to it as a way to write what I know and a city that I’m very passionate about I believe has a lot to offer the world.

We were unable to film there full-time, unfortunately, although our Vancouver experience has been great, but the lure of bringing work to my hometown every so often was also part of the equation.

DEADLINE: By the way, Vancouver does not make for a good Switzerland in the opening of the pilot, just saying.

SWEENY: I know, I know, it’s a very lush representation of Switzerland, the rainforest version of Switzerland.

DEADLINE: Watson wears a Carnegie Mellon University sweatshirt, I assume he is an alumni?

SWEENY: Yes, Watson is an alumni of CMU. And we actually shot in the Tepper Center, which is their business school. Some of the pilot was shot there, we’re pretending that it’s a hospital.

DEADLINE: Besides the serendipity with The Pitt, there also will be inevitable comparisons to another medical drama, House because of the setup: an accomplished doctor leads a group of young, bright MDs in solving medical mysteries.

SWEENY: Well, I would never pretend that House is not a creative antecedent to what we’re doing. House itself drew heavily from the Sherlock Holmes mythology. When House was hot, there were a ton of shows that were doing almost exactly House, or at least that was the way I experienced it. This felt like, with the benefit of time and a little bit of reinterpretation of the lead character, a valid way to go for me.

I think the other thing that distinguishes us from House is that it’s 14 years of medicine. Watson is a geneticist, and there’ve been enormous advances in that world and that science since the time House was on the air. We’re exploring a lot of different corners of knowledge than House would. But yeah, there are what I perceive to be healthy similarities, the idea of confusing medical cases that take great brains to solve them remains intriguing.

DEADLINE: What about the decision to make Watson a geneticist? I don’t think that field even existed by that name back when the original Watson character was created.

SWEENY: It’s the locus of a lot of current research and knowledge. It was very important to me to have a partnership with a physician. The typical way a consulting relationship works on a TV show is, you do your story, you research it as best you can, and you send your script off to your consultant who tells you, change this, change that, but generally, those folks know that if they say too much, you’re going to hire another consultant.

I wanted something different, I wanted more of a partnership. So I put out tendrils through people I’d worked with to find a really great medical partner, somebody I could bring in at the level of story concept who could guide us and make sure the science was accurate. And of the people I met with, the physician, Shäron Moalem, who is an executive producer on the show and an eminent geneticist, appealed most to what I was hoping to do with the show. It was his body of knowledge that convinced me that genetics was the right sort of locus for the clinic.

DEADLINE: You have identical twin characters played by the same actor. It is logistically a little challenging as you have many shots of both of them together, even one behind the other. Why did you decide to do that? You couldn’t find actors who are identical twins?

SWEENY: I never tried to find identical twin actors. Obviously that’s something that’s been done and done extraordinarily well in films. I’m sure you could go back further than Dead Ringers but that was the first one I saw with Jeremy Irons where I was blown away. When I saw The Social Network, I didn’t know who Armie Hammer was, I found that was actually one person and was so impressed by what David Fincher pulled off there.

All these years later, anytime I do a show, I’m looking for some new element that’s never quite been done before, that hasn’t been duplicated or done on a network procedural. I thought the tech had advanced to the point where that was something we could do as it was very important to me. We didn’t look for identical twin actors; I wanted to present the challenge to an actor to embody both of those characters.

DEADLINE: I would be remiss if I don’t add Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan to the list.

SWEENY: Yes, you’re right. I’m remiss, too. Parent Trap is the OG.

DEADLINE: Watson in your version went through this traumatic experience at the falls and he seems to be in a very dark place. He’s getting some help, but the pills are not going to make things better. And then he’s also coming off the breakup of his marriage to Mary, which he clearly hasn’t gotten over. How much will Watson have to deal will his personal demons this season?

SWEENY: He’s healing from his traumatic brain injury and prescribing medication to himself, which, of course, is being monkeyed with by Moriarty via Shinwell. So yes, that will complicate his practice. It’s a story in some ways, that is push-pull with Mary; what kind of relationships are they going to have? Can they be friends?

He’s struggled with all of that throughout. But what you see week to week is that the character of Watson and the performer Morris, they’re enormously empathetic people. He has these intense relationships with patients who he really, really cares for. And that’s another important distinction from House where the empathy on House was much more buried under layers and layers of sarcasm. Watson’s heart is out there for his patients. And so it’s all about struggling through the clutter of what Moriarty is doing, through what’s going on with Mary, to do the best thing and the right thing for the people he’s treating.

DEADLINE: How did Morris Chestnut get on your radar for Watson? And was it an easy sell for him to do the show?

SWEENY: It was an easy sell for me. When you’re writing a pilot, obviously you haven’t cast roles. And so there’s a danger that you’re writing abstract voices. So what I often do — and I know a lot of writers do — is I picture particular performers; it helps me if I imagine I’m writing for them, I find that it makes the writing specific, as opposed to just expositional.

I pictured several different performers as I was writing Watson. One of them was Morris, who I’d never met, I never worked with, but he was somebody who I had imagined playing this role before it ever became real that he might. When he expressed interest, it was by far the easiest lead casting experience I ever had. We met once, CBS approved it, and he took the role. It was beautiful, I was blessed.

DEADLINE: In closing, what should viewers expect from Watson this season?

SWEENY: For me, the goal with the show was that every week, you can tune in, you can be entertained by a twisty mystery, you can be moved by people facing something we all face in our own lives, which is sickness. And you can learn something new about the world. I’m really proud of the show, I think it has a lot of fun and meaningful elements to it. So I hope people will enjoy it.