Every Sherlock Holmes Adaptation, Ranked for Faithfulness: Granada, BBC, Downey, Elementary

Guinness World Records counted 254 screen portrayals of Sherlock Holmes by more than 75 actors when it named him the most portrayed literary human character in film and television, and that count was taken in 2012, before two of the four versions people now argue about had finished airing. Ask which one is best and you get a fight. Ask which one is closest to what Arthur Conan Doyle actually wrote and the answer is duller, older, and fairly settled.

• ✅Most faithful: Granada, 1984 to 1994. Jeremy Brett, 41 episodes, adapted story by story from the page.
• ✅Most watched: BBC’s Sherlock. Thirteen episodes in seven years, and a deliberate rewrite rather than an adaptation.
• ✅Loosest: the Guy Ritchie films. Two of them, 2009 and 2011, with the second one closer to Doyle than the first.
• ✅Best long game: Elementary. Seven seasons of the weekly casework the stories are actually made of.

The yardstick this piece measures all four against is the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the playable version of that book puts you inside them rather than in front of them. What follows compares the four screen versions against the same source.

🎬 The short answer, and the older answer

Before any of the four, there was a man on a stage. William Gillette’s play opened on Broadway on 6 November 1899 at the Garrick Theatre, and Gillette had written to Doyle to ask whether he could marry Holmes off. Doyle, by then thoroughly sick of the character, is reported to have wired back that Gillette could marry him or murder him or do anything he liked with him. The wording drifts from one retelling to the next, so the line is an anecdote rather than a transcript. What is not in doubt is that the play went ahead with Doyle’s blessing. Every screen Holmes since has been working inside that permission, and the argument about faithfulness is really an argument about how much of it to take.

The playable version gives you the case as a room rather than a scene: The Man with the Twisted Lip opens on an opium den in Upper Swandam Lane, and whether you go in as yourself is the first thing it asks you. Role-play The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes →

🎩 Granada, 1984 to 1994

Forty-one episodes across four series titles, thirty-six of them an hour long and five feature length, made in Manchester on a purpose-built Baker Street. Wikipedia’s own summary of the series is that it is considered to present the most faithful screen adaptations of many of the Holmes stories, and CBR puts it more bluntly in its case for Brett: none are as faithful as Granada’s.

The reason is structural rather than reverential. Granada adapted one story per episode and took the episode title from the story, so the shape of an hour matches the shape of a short story, which is what Doyle wrote. Jeremy Brett, who lived from 1933 to 1995 and played the part for the last decade of his life, also read the text as a script rather than a legend: the abruptness, the boredom between cases and the flashes of cruelty are all on the page, and most other screen Holmeses smooth them away.

📱 BBC’s Sherlock, 2010 to 2017

Thirteen episodes in seven years, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and the version that put Holmes back in the centre of popular culture. It is also the one that changes the most, which its makers have never pretended otherwise about. The plots are transposed to modern London, the endings are rewritten, and the series is built around a continuing antagonist, which is precisely the thing the twelve stories do not have.

Its pilot is the clearest illustration of the scope problem. The episode everybody cites in the book-versus-show argument adapts A Study in Scarlet, a novel from 1887, and not one of the twelve Adventures at all. Comparing the show to the collection through that episode compares two different books. Where it does adapt one of the twelve, in the 2012 episode drawn from A Scandal in Bohemia, it keeps the premise and reverses the outcome, and that change has an essay of its own.

💥 The Guy Ritchie films, 2009 and 2011

Two films, both directed by Ritchie, with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. Neither adapts a specific story: the first is an original plot, and the second, A Game of Shadows, is the one that reaches into the canon, drawing on “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House”. Both of those are from later collections, so a reader who has only finished the twelve Adventures has not met that material yet.

On fidelity the honest verdict is narrow. The plots are inventions and the pacing is a modern action film’s. The physical competence is not one of the inventions. In The Five Orange Pips, Watson recites the written assessment he once made of his friend and the list includes violin-player, boxer and swordsman, and in The Speckled Band Holmes answers a man who has bent a steel poker into a curve by straightening it out again with his hands. The films enlarge something the text actually contains and ignore most of what surrounds it.

🗽 Elementary, 2012 to 2019

Seven seasons and 154 episodes on CBS, with Holmes in recovery in New York and Joan Watson as his sober companion. On any measure of textual fidelity it ranks last of the four: the setting, the cases and most of the characters are new, and it takes the largest liberty any Holmes adaptation has taken with the canon by revealing, in its first-season finale in May 2013, that its Irene Adler is Moriarty.

It earns a defence anyway, and it is a defence about form. The stories are a monthly serial of self-contained cases with a difficult man and a patient friend, and 154 episodes of weekly casework reproduce that rhythm far better than thirteen feature-length events do. Readers who prefer Elementary usually turn out to be arguing about structure rather than about accuracy, and on structure they have a point.

❄️ Why screen Holmes keeps getting colder

There is a legal reason lurking behind the tonal one. Holmes’s later stories entered the public domain in the United States much more slowly than the early ones, and in June 2020 the Conan Doyle Estate sued Netflix, Penguin Random House and the author Nancy Springer over Enola Holmes, arguing that Holmes’s warmth, his empathy and his respect for women were original to the later stories it still held rights in. The case was dismissed with prejudice on 18 December 2020 under a stipulated settlement whose terms were never made public, so no court ever ruled on the argument.

The argument itself is the interesting part, because it concedes something about the version of Holmes everyone thinks is the accurate one. A cold, unfeeling calculating machine is the safe, free, early-canon Holmes. The man who is kind to a frightened client is the one somebody claimed to own. Readers who find the screen versions chillier than the book are noticing something real, and one of the twelve stories catches Holmes worrying about a client in a way none of these four versions has room for.

The twelve stories every one of these versions is standing on are free at Project Gutenberg, and if you are deciding where to begin, Doyle ranked them himself in 1927. The screen Watsons are worth comparing against the Watson Doyle actually wrote, who is an army surgeon and not a punchline.