Guy Ritchie isn’t done with Sherlock Holmes yet. Having made two uncanonical movies on the Victorian-era private investigator and his Boswell, Ritchie now turns his attention to Holmes’s formative years.

Ritchie is one of the executive producers and directors of Young Sherlock, based on the Young Sherlock Holmes set of novels by Andrew Lane. Developed by Ritchie and Peter Harness, and written by Harness and Matthew Parkhill, the Prime Video series is an imagined origin story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective.

Sherlock (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is a 19-year-old mischief-maker, prone to being expelled from school and landing up in prison for misdemeanours. As a punishment, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (Max Irons) sends him to Oxford to be a butler for the university’s dons.

There, Sherlock meets another young man who will serve as his partner in ratiocination. Not John Watson, but James Moriarty – the show’s most compelling idea.

Like Sherlock, James (Donal Finn) is still buffering, many years away from being a nefarious supervillain. The duo gets involved in a grand conspiracy revolving around the Chinese princess Shou’an (Zine Tseng), missing scrolls, attacks on the professors, including Bucephalus Hodge (Colin Firth), a growing pile of bodies, and a dangerous invention.

The eight-episode series doubles up as a Meet the Holmes drama. There’s the...

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