How hit podcast Sherlock & Co made Sherlock Holmes a neurodivergent hero
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories now have a neurodivergent hero in the hit audio drama Sherlock and Co
Alex Hahn
- Gareth McLean
Every morning when he wakes up, Joel Emery says he hears a voice in his head saying, “Don’t mess it up.” “It” is the hit series Sherlock & Co, a contemporary re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes’s investigations made by the Goalhanger production company. With some 20 million streams and downloads, sold-out live shows and a cabinetful of awards – that might, come 23 November, also include Best Podcast: Narrative from the 2026 British Audio Awards (the Speakies) – it is one of the UK’s most-popular drama podcasts.
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When it is done, it will be the only adaptation to have modernised every story, and only the third of any kind to have adapted all 60. Emery has written all 51 stories currently available. With nine to go, he’s taking nothing for granted. “It’s all hands on deck to make sure we land this thing we’ve been doing for three-and-a-bit years,” he says.
The journey has been unorthodox. Rather than working through the canon in order, Emery started with The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, one of Doyle’s last stories, published in 1924. The reasoning was partly strategic. The BBC’s modern-day Sherlock cast a long shadow, and Emery wanted to showcase the short stories that “we knew were being forgotten about by modern adaptations”.
Subsequently, free to pick his own order – “which has been really fun for our already Sherlock-enthused, Doyle-red-pilled fans, because there’s a sense of ‘What’s coming next?’ ” – Emery also solved a practical problem. “Doyle wrote the stories over 35 years. If you do them in order, you might end up with a famous piece of art being stolen in one story… and the next story is about a piece of art being stolen. For Doyle, it’s probably been 15 years between stories, but for us, it’s a week.”
Updating the stories has also meant jettisoning a considerable amount. Many are peculiar, small-scale (“It’s not Poirot, it’s not all murder”) and rooted in Victorian class anxieties. Genders have been swapped (“too many damsels in distress are boring”), manor-house mysteries have been relocated to universities and theme parks, and judicious editing expunges prejudice. The Man with the Twisted Lip, “which was ableist by 1990s standards, never mind now”, became a child’s innocent phrase. In A Study in Scarlet, Mormons are simply “people of faith”. The Sign of Four, with its disparaging view of the Indian subcontinent, needed heavy reverse engineering and proved the hardest tale to adapt.
Sherlock didn’t tick all the boxes – no autistic person does – but he ticked a lot
But as significant as Emery’s excisions are what he’s added. Dr Watson is now a true-crime podcaster, while Mrs Hudson has been re-imagined as the altogether more go-getting (and Spanish) Mariana. But perhaps the most significant change is that Sherlock is neurodivergent. Emery’s reason for this? Entirely personal.
“When I was writing the pilot, my eldest, who was only two at the time, was diagnosed as autistic,” Emery says. “Obviously I was reading as much as I could about it at the same time as I was reading Doyle and I found it very difficult to decouple the two things. Sherlock didn’t tick all the boxes – no autistic person does – but he ticked a lot of them.”
Goalhanger said, “Go for it,” and Emery knew subtlety would be key. “To have Sherlock Holmes say, ‘I am autistic’ in the first two minutes of the show would have felt cheap,” he says. So it began as “an ‘if you know, you know’ type of thing”: ear defenders, fussiness, a social battery with a limited lifespan.
What Emery hadn’t anticipated was how much autistic listeners love Sherlock Holmes. Meeting teenage and young adult fans at events is life-affirming, he says. His daughter is now seven, and seeing so many vibrant young autistic people has “lowered the anxiety” about her future.
Emery describes himself as “a bit of a normie”, a rural Berkshire dad whose background is comedy. He finds drama harder – writing deduction scenes still taxes him – and he only trusts a draft if it has made him smile.
What drives him, ultimately, is a belief in imagination, a conviction that underpins his work as Goalhanger’s Head of Drama. He says that audiences can’t live on “a mono diet of chat” and his drama slate is shaped by who is listening. Sherlock & Co attracts a younger (under-30s) audience that he’s told skews female, so spin-offs will follow with Mycroft Holmes as a fun, James Bond-style operative, and Lily Lestrade in a police procedural. Future plans are for more original work, which includes saying no to more Victoriana.
“Is there a War of the Worlds fan club desperate for a remake? Not really.” Sherlock is different, he says: “a character more famous than his author, he’s Britain’s answer to Superman, who does the dirty work that intrigues us rather than saving the galaxy. Sherlock’s a unicorn.”
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Emery has nine stories left to adapt including, naturally, The Final Problem. Will Sherlock’s trip to the Reichenbach Falls provide Sherlock & Co with its big finish? “It certainly looks that way,” Emery says, cryptically. “But anything is possible.”
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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