PBS announced today the US premiere date for the new docuseries Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle.
Most recently, the ever-popular British historian Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces in the U.K. as well as author (Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life, A Very British Murder) and television presenter (12 Days of Tudor Christmas, Tales from the Royal Bedchamber), delved into the life of the Queen of Crime® in her docuseries Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen and companion book Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman.
She will be back on US telly relatively soon with her next docuseries: Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle, in which she investigates the curious love-hate relationship between Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective who never lived, and the complex man and author who created him: Arthur Conan Doyle.
The three-part docuseries follows Lucy Worsley, a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, as she seeks to answer the question of why author Arthur Conan Doyle came to despise Sherlock Holmes, his most famous character and the one that made him rich and famous. Throughout the series, Worsley explores the parallel lives of Doyle and Holmes in the historical context of their times. From the dying years of Victorian England, through the imperial crisis of the Boer war, from the optimism of the early Edwardian years, to the trauma of The Great War, Arthur and Sherlock lived through them all.
In the first episode, “Doctor and Detective,” Lucy unearths Holmes’s origins in Doyle’s early life as a medical student in Edinburgh. She unpacks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain, from drug use to true crime. Worsley also explores how Doyle infused his stories with cutting-edge technological developments, as well as traces the author’s growing disenchantment with his detective, heading to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature.
The second episode, “Fact and Fiction,” sees Lucy explore Doyle’s desire to distance himself from Sherlock after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. From the delights of the ski slopes to the horrors of the Boer War, she reveals how far Doyle went to make himself the hero of his own story. He even took on the role of detective himself in one of the most important legal cases of the 20th century (which was dramatized in the limited series Arthur & George, starring Martin Clunes as Doyle, currently available for streaming on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel).
And in the series finale, “Shadows and Sleuths,” Lucy investigates the return of Sherlock. Doyle began the Edwardian age delighting in all it had to offer, but as World War I approached, the darkness of the later stories mirrored the reality of Doyle’s life. After losing his eldest son, he became an evangelist for spiritualism, and his star declined after a public spat with famous magician and former friend Harry Houdini. By contrast, Sherlock Holmes found a life beyond his author on both stage and screen.
Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle premieres in the US on Sunday, December 8, at 8pm ET, on PBS (check your local listings), with streaming available on PBS.org and the PBS app. New episodes will air at the same time on December 15 and December 22.
The series is a BBC Studios production for BBC Two, BBC iPlayer, and PBS. The producers are Rachel Jardine and Laura Blount, the series producer is Linda Sands, and the executive producer is Amanda Lyon. The commissioning editor for BBC Arts is Mark Bell. Zara Frankel is the Executive in Charge for PBS. BBC Studios is handling global distribution.
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