Morris Chestnut is Wasted on Inferior “Watson” | TV/Streaming

There is no point to CBS’s utterly stale procedural “Watson.” It thinks it’s clever but isn’t. The writing is in shambles. The original score possesses all the depth and nuance of a toddler’s tiny electronic keyboard going boop-boop-boop. 

In the pilot’s opening scenes, John Watson (Morris Chestnut, charming as ever) falls over Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls in order to save his friend Sherlock Holmes, who’s caught in a struggle with famed arch enemy James Moriarty. Only Watson survives, and when he wakes in hospital, an associate named Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster, who doesn’t have much to do but use his Cockney accent as a weapon) informs him that not only was his late friend a wealthy man, he has left his fortune in trust to be used as a diagnostic clinic, where Watson and a team of specialists can diagnose and treat unusual medical conditions.

If you’re wondering whether “Watson” resembles a certain Fox series starring Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard (as stand-ins for Holmes and Watson, no less), you’d be right. Each episode of “Watson” is structured exactly like an episode of “House”: Someone with a novel and/or challenging medical issue collapses, they’re hustled into Watson’s hospital, and the doctor’s ragtag team of specialists runs differential diagnoses to help the patient. The former detective’s team includes Dr. Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), who provides the audience with valuable insight into her character by looking up Cluster B personality disorder symptoms in the DSM-V; Dr. Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann), a Chinese adoptee raised in a wealthy Dallas suburb who, in a stroke of writerly genius, shares a name with a city from her home state; and Dr. Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes), Watson’s wife—she didn’t take kindly to being left behind when Watson ran off to help his friend in Switzerland and wants a divorce—and the hospital’s medical director.

The most wasted members of the cast, at least in the five episodes screened for review, are Morris Chestnut and Peter Mark Kendall. The former was a dreamy, compelling presence in BET’s “Diarra from Detroit,” playing a suave yet flawed man, hiding a major secret from his soon-to-be-ex-wife. Here, he is stilted by the two-dimensional writing. Watson lies, but it’s all for the greater good; he’s suffering from two traumatic brain injuries, but is, somehow, permitted to diagnose and treat patients. Kendall, who added layers of complexity to “The Americans” as a KGB spy-in-training, does double duty on “Watson” as twin doctors Drs. Adam and Stephens Croft, members of Watson’s team. Dr. Stephens wears glasses and is addicted to a cam girl, Dr. Adam doesn’t and is dating his brother’s ex-girlfriend. And…that’s it! That’s the extent of their characterization. Randall Park appears once as Moriarty, and talk about a waste—a take on the infamous villain as played by one of our most delightful working comedians might actually be interesting. Unfortunately, his lines are just as stilted as those of the other characters, and he’s onscreen for less than five minutes.

It is extraordinary how indolent the writing is on “Watson”; all creator Craig Sweeney (who worked on “Medium” and “Elementary,” of course) had to do was mash up previous shows he’s worked on, plus a few we’ve all seen, et voila! “House” was so successful because Laurie, as the demented genius doctor, deployed a consummate prickliness against Cuddy’s frustration and Wilson’s innate decency. The writing here isn’t strong enough to create these dynamics between the characters, and Laurie’s unmatched wit is a sad and distant memory. 

If a television network is willing to hand you millions of dollars to make a new show, it would be my fervent hope you would not squander that opportunity. You would work in earnest to write the best scripts you possibly could, reinvent stale tropes, commission a unique background score, completely redefine the audience’s horizon of expectations—or at least as close to that as you could get. I don’t know which is worse: being incapable of something new, or being too lazy to bother. 

Five episodes screened for review. Premieres on Sunday, January 26th.