The Netflix and BBC collaboration The Irregulars features an unusual perspective for a Sherlock Holmes story. The series focuses on the story of four impoverished youths who are given assignments by John Watson and gradually become wrapped up in a larger, occult mystery. The Irregulars' supernatural storylines and flawed, emotional Holmes mark a major departure from Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, but the eponymous Baker Street Irregulars are actually based on a set of recurring characters from Doyle's fiction. Nevertheless, the Netflix series fleshes out and changes the Irregulars so much that they are essentially new characters.
Doyle's Baker Street Irregulars make their appearance in the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, as a group of neighborhood street boys employed to track down the cabman Jefferson Hope (a name that appears again in The Irregulars.) The Irregulars returns in the second novel, The Sign of the Four, where they are described as an unofficial section of the police force and are briefly referenced in the short story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man." The Irregulars were Doyle's way of depicting Victorian London's homeless problem as well as depicting Holmes' willingness to use unconventional methods to solve mysteries
The biggest difference between Doyle's street children and the cast of The Irregulars is the greater detail and individuality that the series gives to the cast. In Doyle's stories, the only named members of the Irregulars are their leader Wiggins and a boy named Simpson, and the reader doesn't find out much about either besides their names. In The Irregulars, the group is a quartet instead of the half-dozen described in A Study in Scarlet, and each has a name, personality, and backstory: resourceful Bea, flighty Jess, headstrong Billy and level-headed Spike. Bea serves as the leader of the group, but there's no clear suggestion that she is meant to be a version of Wiggins.
The main characters of The Irregulars also have a much closer tie to Sherlock Holmes than their literary equivalents. In Doyle's fiction the Irregulars are essential hirelings with no emotional link to Holmes. The mystery that the Irregulars investigate reveals that their traumatic pasts are linked to those of Holmes and Watson, as well as the supernatural threat menacing London. The Irregulars eventually reveals that Bea and Jessie are Sherlock's daughters, the result of a love affair between him and the psychic Alice. This connection means that the relationship between Holmes and the Irregulars is entirely different in the new version.
Netflix's Irregulars are also a more diverse and older group than Doyle's. Whereas in the original Holmes novels the Irregulars were all boys, the two most important members in The Irregulars are a pair of sisters. The series also uses race-blind casting to create a more ethnically diverse depiction of Victorian London. While Doyle's Irregulars are typically depicted as young boys, The Irregulars stars a group of older teenagers, with the series beginning on Jessie's seventeenth birthday. The result is a purposefully iconoclastic take on both the Irregulars and the broader Holmes mythos.
The Irregulars is the latest in a series of pop-culture reinventions of Sherlock Holmes ignited by the success of the BBC's Sherlock, including CBS's Elementary and Netflix's own Enola Holmes. But The Irregulars may offer the most radical reinvention yet, decentering Sherlock as protagonist and telling a different type of story. The Irregulars may have their roots in Doyle's story, but the series' characters are very much a new creation.