The whole world knows Sherlock Holmes—now get to know the story behind the classic character, as well as the man who created him. Premiering tonight, December 8 at 8pm Eastern Time, Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle is a new three-part series on PBS that sees popular British historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan Lucy Worsley seek to answer why author Arthur Conan Doyle came to despise the character that made him so rich and famous.
"Throughout the series, Worsley explores the parallel lives of Doyle and Holmes in the historical context of their times," reads the official show description, per PBS. "From the dying years of Victorian England, through the imperial crisis of the Boer war, the optimism of the early Edwardian years, to the trauma of the First World War, Arthur and Sherlock lived through them all."
The premiere episode of Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle, entitled "Doctor and Detective," will kick things off with Doyle’s early life as a medical student in Edinburgh. Worsley unpacks Holmes' origins, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain, as well as the author’s growing disenchantment with his detective as he headed to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature.
Episode two, "Fact and Fiction," will follow next Sunday, December 15, focused on Doyle’s desire to distance himself from his famous character after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. In the finale, “Shadows and Sleuths” (capping things off on Sunday, December 22), Lucy investigates the return of Sherlock as well as how the darkness of later Holmes stories mirrored the reality of Doyle's life.
To watch Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle. you will need access to PBS. You can tune into your local PBS station through a traditional pay-TV provider or via a live TV streaming service (i.e. Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV) and specific channels on streaming services, like the PBS channel on Prime Video. PBS.org website and the PBS app are also options and are free for all.
Check out a preview of Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle before watching the premiere of the three-part series tonight on PBS.
