“Three years had certainly not smoothed the asperities of his temper” [EMPT]
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| Rafe Spall and Deleila Piasko (Sky) |
Of all the periods in the Canon that have tantalized Sherlockians, there are two that consistently are intriguing, the first of which is Sherlock Holmes's formative years. The now-classic film Young Sherlock Holmes and the more recent series Young Sherlock have taken on this period with gusto.
The latest entry in this venerable tradition comes from a Swiss-German-Belgian co-production titled The Death of Sherlock Holmes (working title), which began filming this spring and is slated for a 2027 premiere.
A Cast and Crew of Note
“extends over many nations” [SIGN]
Rafe Spall (Under Salt Marsh, Trying) takes up the deerstalker — or whatever passes for one in his amnesiac state — alongside Deleila Piasko (The Exposure, Transatlantic).
The series is the brainchild of Claudia Bluemhuber (Fallen, Robin and the Hoods), André Küttel (Needle Park Baby, Die Beschatter), and Pierre Monnard (Needle Park Baby, Winter Palace), with Küttel and Simone Schmid (Die Beschatter) handling the scripts. Monnard and Bluemhuber share directing duties.
Producer Silver Reel, fresh off a 2025 International Emmy win for the YA series Fallen, is steering the project alongside Sky Switzerland, SRF, ARD Degeto, and Umedia. Sphere Abacus is handling international distribution, while Sky has acquired exclusive U.K. and Ireland broadcast rights.
According to SRF, filming will take place in Switzerland, South Tyrol, and Bavaria.
What Happened After Reichenbach?
“It was, indeed, a fearful place” [FINA]
Here is where the premise gets interesting for those of us who have spent considerable time pondering the Hiatus. Set against what the producers describe as the "majestic and merciless" Swiss Alps, the story opens with an Englishman pulled barely alive from an icy mountain stream by a local woman named Alma and her young son Franz. When the village doctor turns up murdered, suspicion falls on the boy — leaving the amnesiac stranger as his only ally.
The man remembers nothing of his past. But flashes of razor-sharp deduction begin to surface, betraying a hidden history. As fragments of memory return, he must reckon with a question that no Sherlockian will find suspenseful in the slightest, but which our hero apparently must work out for himself: who is he, really?
What begins as an isolated Alpine mystery widens into a far-reaching conspiracy, inching him toward the legendary name he may once have borne. It is, in essence, the Great Hiatus told as a memory-loss thriller, with the Holmes compelled to deduce his own identity.
A Crowded Field and a Welcome Addition
“So many have said so, and yet here I am” [THOR]
SRF notes that there are more than 250 Sherlock Holmes screen productions — making him the most-portrayed literary character in cinema history. Adding another television series to that already groaning shelf might seem redundant, particularly at this time, but the Hiatus has always been fertile ground precisely because Conan Doyle left it so sparsely filled in.
From Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to Caleb Carr's The Italian Secretary and Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk, writers have repeatedly returned to the question of where Holmes went and what he did.
What sets this production apart is its geography. Filming in the very Alps where Conan Doyle dispatched his hero — and where Sherlockians have made annual pilgrimages to Meiringen and the Reichenbach Falls for decades (the most recent by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London having just concluded) — promises an authenticity of setting that no soundstage can replicate.
Whether the storytelling rises to the level of the locations, we shall have to wait until 2027 to discover.
For now, we will be following with great interest. As Holmes himself observed upon his return:
“My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.”
We trust you will be affected by this latest addition to the canon of the Sherlockian screen.
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