If you enjoy your Sherlock Holmes with a pinch of the supernatural and…not a heck of a lot of Sherlock Holmes, well, you might want to add The Irregulars to your Netflix queue. In Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, the Baker Street Irregulars were a group of street kids who Holmes would employ to get information, but Tom Bidwell has reimagined the youthful gang as a ragtag group of teenagers who join forces to uncover "the demonic and mysterious depths of Victorian London alongside the sinister Dr Watson and his enigmatic business partner, Sherlock Holmes." Netflix has released the first trailer for the upcoming series, which you can check out above.
"Our story focuses on the Irregulars, the gang themselves. It's their story, their adventure," Tom Bidwell told Entertainment Weekly last month. "Sherlock Holmes is in the story, it's his world, but he's not the central focus. He plays a big part of it, don't get me wrong, but it's about the kids and their journeys." As for the supernatural threats, Bidwell said that when he was reading the original novels, he kept wishing that those supernatural elements that were inevitably exposed as fraud were real. "In our show, the mysteries can be solved, but they can't be very easily explained with rational thought — there's monsters and ghouls and horrors attacking the city of London," Bidwell explained. Although the series is a bit of a departure from Holmes-lore, Bidwell said that he "didn't want to just take Sherlock and shred it to pieces just for the sake of doing it. I love the Sherlock Holmes books but I knew I wanted to make something very different, and make something that had a different type of Arthur Conan Doyle stamp on it."
The Irregulars will debut on Netflix on March 26th.