It’s not as though I saw the trailers for Guy Richie’s new Sherlock Holmes movie and thought, “Wow, that Guy Ritchie sure knows how to make up interesting characters with weird names.” I know who Sherlock Holmes is. I have read some of the books. I have seen other adaptations. However, it wasn’t until I was in the theater yesterday watching the aforementioned Guy Ritchie film that I had an epiphany: The Holmes/Watson relationship is exactly like the House/Wilson one.
Sherlock Holmes enjoys drugs, solitude, and has a brilliant deductive mind, all of which are Dr. House’s trademarks. In the very beginning of the film, Holmes is in a depressive state and is shooting up a wall in the home that he shares with Dr. Watson. Granted, House has never sat around shooting up a wall on the show, but couldn’t you picture it? Now that he and Wilson are roommates, would you, or Wilson for that matter, be at all surprised to come home after a long day at work only to find the neighbors in a panic and House calmly sitting on the couch, smoking gun in hand and initials shot perfectly into the wall (or flat screen)?
Don’t get me wrong, I am well aware (thanks to editor Keith McDuffee, among others on Twitter) that I am not brilliant, and was definitely not the first one to come to this realization. In fact, TV Squad laid out the parallels very clearly way back in ’06. David Shore himself has even acknowledged that House was inspired by Holmes. So while this is old news to many of you, I’m sure that there are some, like me, whose brains went, “click, click, click,” but never quite got there until now. I guess I always realized that House and Holmes were similar in their deductive reasoning skills, but I never realized that Holmes was quite as codependent as House is.
When you talk about TV series that should be made into feature-length films, House doesn’t often come up on the list. However, I’ve been asked by a few people whether or not Sherlock Holmes is any good. My response to them? “If you like Rachel McAdams (who is awesome) and you like House, then you will like this movie. It is basically two hours of House set in the 1800s, but minus the cane and with a bunch of ass-kicking.” Who doesn’t want that?
So my question to you is, with the success of the very House-like Sherlock Holmes, would you actually like to see a movie version of House? Or is this close enough for you?
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Jan 07, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
Yeah, you were pretty much the only one. ;-) They even gave House’s old place the same number as the one Sherlock Holmes had in the books.
I don’t know if a movie version of House would work though. Not unless they had a bad guy releasing a virus or something that House had to figure out how to stop him. The TV plots don’t lead to a lot of action sequences, and big budget movies tend to rely on them.
Yeah, I figured as much! Although, I honestly don’t recall the Holmes/Watson relationship being so co-dependent. That’s the part that really struck me.
Clearly Ritchie and company spun the dependency in a different, but Watson and Holmes did do everything together. Even when Watson married and moved, Holmes frequently requested his weekend assistance. I remember one short story in which Watson neglected his wife due to patient overload, and despite that she allowed Watson to spend his vacation with Holmes instead of her when a new case arose. Even as a teenager, I viewed that as angelic on the wife’s part and partially insensitive on Watson’s part.
I didn’t enjoy Sherlock Holmes at all. I kept comparing it to House the whole time and House is just so much better. House’s jokes are funny. Holmes’ not so much.
Hugh Laurie is the best Sherlock Holmes ever.
To answer your title…Yes.
Plus they share the same address.
The House-Holmes connection was pretty obvious from the start (at least to those familiar with ol’ Sherlock), but it comes as a nice discovery to fans who are only familiar with House. The drug addiction was one huge parallel – Watson tries to get Holmes off drugs, just like Wilson tries to get House off the Vicodin. Another thing is that Holmes plays the violin, and House plays the piano and guitar. There are other little things dropped in – it’s fun to spot them.
Oh, and I neglected to mention the most blatant hint of all – House gets shot by a guy named Jack Moriarty! Can’t get much more obvious than that, since Holmes was also nearly killed by his nemesis Professor Moriarty.
You were not the only one. I’ll admit to not realizing it either. But, as the hints and parallels are explained, I don’t understand how I couldn’t have seen it…
Yes. The parallels are there because the writers of the show had Sherlock in mind when they came up with the character, House. Hence, the names even, Holmes..eg. House, Watson, eg. Wilson… etc. All of these parallels were thought of way ahead of time.
You aren’t the only one who realizes it since that was the intention of the show from the outset to remold a 21st century Sherlock.
Also, I think House is a much better Sherlock than the one portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. Much more spot on to the original character.