Finland jumps on the ‘Sherlock’ bandwagon
According to Radio Times, there’s about to be a new Sherlock in town. Well, in 2019 anyway. Sherlock North, to be produced by U.S. and Finnish production outlet, Snapper Films, is in the works charting the consulting detective’s time in Finland when he was on the run from Professor Moriarty.
Based on an interlude in the 1903 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Empty House”, the 10-part series will go in-depth to chronicle Holmes’ stay in Finland when he is on the run from his arch adversary after faking his own death at the Reichenbach Falls.
Under a false identity, an explorer named Sigerson, Holmes settles in dark and cold Lapland, in northern Finland, sparking a culture clash between the upper-class, fast-talking and eccentric Brit and the down-to-earth Nordic characters. Unfortunately, for Holmes, the more he works as a detective, the more he is at risk of Moriarty finding out his whereabouts.
At the recent 40th Göteborg Film Festival, the leading film festival in the Nordic countries, Finnish writer-director-producer Juha Wuolijoki sounded almost as giddy as Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis did some 7 years ago when discussing their then upcoming BBC/PBS series, Sherlock.
“I got to know representatives of the Conan Doyle Estate, and we were discussing the Sherlock brand; his stay in Scandinavia is in the book, but nobody has done anything about it,” the director said in a report by Variety.
“Originally I had thought of faking it, but it was not necessary. Here is a fish-out-of-water story: Holmes is hiding from Moriarty but doesn’t know how his new landscape works. But he cannot live if not involved in something. He is a cocaine user, and although he has promised his brother Mycroft that he won’t do this, he starts solving local small crime mysteries, which lead into some bigger issues, helped by a Finnish former woman doctor, Johanna Watson. Doyle did not write what he did there, we created that, and it has been totally approved by the Doyle Estate. It is a Nordic series, with a Nordic identity, with an international appeal.”
Sherlock North is set to film in the Winter of 2018 with a target broadcast date of 2019. Hopefully, we’ll be welcoming back Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in new episodes of the BBC/PBS Sherlock around the same time….
In: Mystery
