TV Talk: Sherlock Holmes lives in season 2 of ‘Watson’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

For its 20-episode second season, CBS’s “Watson” (10 p.m. Oct. 13, KDKA-TV) won’t bring the cast to Pittsburgh, where the show is set, to film new scenes, as the series did in June 2024 for its first season.

“Sadly,” acknowledged “Watson” creator and Pittsburgh native Craig Sweeny. “We always want to do it. I always feel like I’m breaking your heart and my hometown’s heart. My goal was to create this show and film it all in Pittsburgh, and there’s only so much I can control.”

(“Watson” saves hundreds of thousands of dollars filming on stages in Vancouver, Canada, as opposed to in the U.S.)

“Watson” has hired a drone crew to shoot exteriors in Pittsburgh, but that’s about it. However, Sweeny promises more Pittsburghese and even a discussion about the regional accent in an upcoming episode.

The “Watson” season premiere showcases a character wearing a Carnegie Mellon University T-shirt and there’s a scene set at an outdoor café with what appears to be a mural of a Steelers player painted on an exterior building wall.

“In my mind, that’s Franco Harris,” Sweeny said, confirming the mural was created by the show’s art department for the on-location outdoor set in Vancouver.

As season two begins, a few months have passed since the season one finale that saw Watson kill his nemesis, Moriarty, whom Watson blames for the death of his mentor and friend, Sherlock Holmes. Troublemaking, anti-social former team member Dr. Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow), who now rocks dyed blond hair, has left the Holmes Clinic at Oakland’s fictional University Hospital of Pittsburgh for a job at Allegheny General Hospital, which serves as the exterior of a different series, “The Pitt.”

And, no, Sweeny said he has no grudge against AGH for saddling the hospital with Ingrid.

“No, no, no,” Sweeny said, laughing at the idea. “It’s a good job! She was competitive all over the country, and she chose the AGH job. I’m very positive on all hospital systems in the greater Pittsburgh area.”

Sweeny said as the season begins, Watson is down a doc-tective as he’s been unsuccessful in finding a replacement for Ingrid. His former consigliere, Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), is now in training to become a nurse.

“They are all struggling with what they did with Moriarty,” Sweeny said. “Their jobs are very urgent and take them in new directions. Other figures may emerge from the woodwork that direct our thinking into new avenues.”

Last November, during a visit to the “Watson” set in Vancouver, Sweeny said he had no plans to reveal that the presumed dead Sherlock is alive until possibly the final episode of the series. But his thinking changed this summer and now Sherlock (Robert Carlyle, “The Full Monty”) will re-emerge.

“I just shouldn’t talk, you know?” Sweeny said, chuckling, and acknowledging it was his idea, not a network request, that resulted in the return of Sherlock sooner than he initially planned. “I didn’t think I wanted Sherlock, (and that) came from a concern that Sherlock would overwhelm Watson.”

But between seasons, as Sweeny considered plots for season two, he came up with “a really good one” for Sherlock.

“I was like, ‘But I said all this stuff in the press,’ so I set that (Sherlock idea) aside,” Sweeny said. “But I kept coming back to it and what eventually turned it for me was that I had seen and observed over the course of the first season that it’s really not a concern (that Sherlock would overwhelm Waston) with Morris Chestnut in that (Watson) role. He holds his own on the screen. The audience doesn’t have trouble relating to (Watson) as the unequivocal hero of the show.”

“Watson” did feature a Sherlock voiceover at the end of season one, with Matt Berry (“What We Do in the Shadows”) providing the voice of the detective.

“The deal to have him do the voice did not come with the deal to have him be Sherlock on screen,” Sweeny explained, hence the need to bring in Carlyle as Sherlock, as CBS announced in July.

The second season of “Watson” also introduces a new set in its first episode, the abandoned lobby of Children’s Hospital.

“I wanted a spot where Watson could go to think that sold the sprawling nature of these hospital complexes in Pittsburgh,” Sweeny said. “They’ve absorbed all these different buildings; they have metabolized entire neighborhoods. The idea of something that had gotten lost within that process was really cool and interesting to me. It also felt very Sherlockian and it’s accurate in a Pittsburgh way.

“So that’s a set where Watson and Sherlock Holmes talk to each other a bunch over the course of the season and it becomes the hub of a mystery,” Sweeny teased. “The set itself is of concern to both Holmes and Watson as significant in some way.”