16 Benedict Cumberbatch Things to Watch After You See Doctor Strange
By Lacy Baugher
Benedict Cumberbatch and a canine friend in the first still from “Sherlock” Season 4. (Photo: (Photo: Courtesy of Robert Viglasky/Hartswood Films for MASTERPIECE)
Sherlock
Let’s be real, this is probably the first thing you saw Benedoop Cumberflap in. It’s basically the thing that everyone knows him from, or at least it will be until the entire globe has sat through Doctor Strange.
A contemporary adaptation of the famous stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock tells the story of the great detective and his BFF John Watson from their very first meeting. The two solve crimes together, share a flat together, get frequently threatened with death together, and star in roughly 10,198,457 fanfics together. Cumberbatch plays an especially prickly, cerebral version of Holmes with the best overcoat in the universe. He loves to tell everyone how clever he is, how he has no friends, and how he thinks everyone sucks. (He basically needs a whole lot of therapy, but this is not that kind of show.)
Martin Freeman plays Watson as the straight man to Sherlock’s many neuroses, and the two of them are perfect together. (See also: The aforementioned 13,596,127 fanfics.) They have a perfect, lightning in a bottle kind of chemistry. They’re so good together that it makes you forget that this show has some plot holes you could drive a truck through. Each episode is a modern take on an original Conan Doyle story (or sometimes a couple combined), and features lots of clever dialogue, literary in-jokes and complicated mysteries to work out.