Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: HBO, HBO Japan, miss sherlock, sherlock

'Miss Sherlock' Premieres on HBO Go on September 1st

HBO Asia's first Japanese production, Miss Sherlock, will premiere in the US on HBO Go.

Ostensibly a Japanese gender-swapped interpretation of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' popular BBC series Sherlock, which reimagines Arthur Conan Doyle's master detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson for the 21st Century, Miss Sherlock takes the premise further by making Sherlock and Watson Japanese women in modern-day Tokyo.

The 8-episode first season sees Dr. Wato Tachibana (played by Shiori Kaniya) returning to Tokyo after serving in a humanitarian aid campaign in Syria and falling in with an antisocial and eccentric consultant detective named "Sherlock". You know the drill.

This is not a remake of the BBC's Sherlock but an interpretation. All the key characters in the Sherlock Holmes mythos are here: Inspector Reimon (Kenichi Takito) as the Tokyo version of Inspector Lestrade, Kimi Hatano (Ran Ito) as the Japanese counterpart to Sherlock and Wato-san's landlady Mrs. Hudson, Kento Futaba (Yukiyoshi Uzawa) as Kento Futaba, Sherlock's older brother and the Japanese version of Mycroft Holmes, also a senior member of the government's secret service. The cases also include Japanese interpretations of some of Doyle's stories, including the reveal of Sherlock's greatest enemy.

And make no mistake, there are moments where it's very clear this is a Japanese version of Moffat and Gatiss' Sherlock. Yukio Takeuchi's Sherlock is every bit as antisocial, rude and manic as Benedict Cumberbatch's without being a carbon copy. Takeuchi is one of the most well-known actors in Japan whose career goes all the way back to the 90s with her starring role in the original Japanese movie of The Ring where she played the mother who would be played by Naomi Watts in the Hollywood remake. Her Sherlock is often even meaner to Wato-san (honorific added to recreate "Watson", geddit?) than Cumberbatch's Sherlock was to Martin Freeman's Watson, and often just as funny. Ever since the show's premiere in Asian back in Spring, there's already a fanatical fandom devoted to "Wato-lock" 'shipping that's spawned a thousand Tumblr and Deviant Art pages. Pretty much like 'shipping for the BBC version, really.

So if you don't have anything better to do come September 1st 2018, and you have HBO, you can stream the series on HBO Go and read some subtitles to see what the fuss was all about and watch Miss Sherlock be epically rude to everyone in Japan.

I wonder if Moffat and Gatiss have seen this show…

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