The Irregulars focuses on the investigations of a group of poor teenagers employed by Dr. John Watson, and the story fixes a common mistake of other popular Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The show deviates from the original stories in several ways, including the supernatural cases and the morally gray light in which Watson and Holmes are portrayed. However, the show’s focus on the Irregulars is what sets this adaptation apart.
The Baker Street Irregulars were introduced in Sherlock Holmes’ first-ever appearance in A Study in Scarlet. Holmes often hired this group of kids from the streets of London to do surveillance, track down leads, and perform menial tasks for his cases. They have appeared in different forms throughout the many films and television adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In BBC’s Sherlock, for example, the Irregulars were adapted into Sherlock’s homeless network, while Elementary turned them into a network of street vendors. However, the people in these networks were rarely even shown, much less given a spotlight.
The narrow focus of most adaptations of the brilliance of Holmes’ crime-solving skills has left little room for the Irregulars who did so much work for him. The Irregulars have featured in two BBC adaptations, The Baker Street Boys and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, but the most popular adaptations have kept the Irregulars as background characters. Even in the original Holmes stories, the focus stayed on Sherlock as he sent this band of children out into the city to find the clues he needed, but in every iteration, he would have been unable to so neatly tie up many of his cases without the help of his often-uncredited employees.
This reinvention of Sherlock Holmes instead gives the Irregulars top billing, following their component of the investigations. Where most adaptations focus on Sherlock’s cerebral crime-solving at 221B, The Irregulars shows the dirty work that goes into solving the cases. As Sherlock Holmes said of his Irregulars in the stories, they can go everywhere and hear everything, drawing people out who would never talk to the authorities. This works especially well for the supernatural cases the show explores, as the authorities are less likely to officially pursue paranormal explanations.
Sherlock Holmes was never the only detective on the case. He always had his Irregulars, the less-respected characters who collected the information he needed to solve his cases. Without their excellent detection skills, Holmes would have been left with loose ends at the end of his stories. The Irregulars finally gives these characters their due, turning them into investigators in their own right.