Gus Mager was an American painter, illustrator, and cartoonist in the early twentieth century. He created a series of characters with  the suffix “the Monk.” There was Knocko the Monk, Braggo the Monk, Tightwaddo the Monk, etc., etc. It’s said that the Marx Brothers were inspired to name their stage personalities after Mager’s creations. Sherlocko the Monk caused some concern from the lawyers representing Arthur Conan Doyle and was renamed Hawkshaw the Detective.

I’ve often enjoyed stories where there’s a different interpretation of iconic characters and situations. We’ve all seen or read different versions of Superman, Batman, Sherlock Holmes and a multitude of other personalities and events. But in that mix of skewed retellings are a lot of duds. 

Netflix has added “The Irregulars” to their schedule. It does, of course, use the rag-tag group of street urchins from the Holmes canon as inspiration. I really don’t have any complaint about the basic concept. I don’t mind that it’s got mixed ethnicities that are historically inaccurate, or that it paints a darker picture of Holmes and Watson, or that it introduces a supernatural element. Though the script is weak it might have succeeded, but I found it lacked that special charisma that lower budget productions (such as Xena, Doctor Who, et al) rely on. 

What grates against my sensibilities the most in any production is twenty-something-year-old actors pretending to be teenagers. And, unfortunately, they are not particularly strong actors. The series missed its opportunity to capture the grittiness of the time period. Everything looked too staged, too clean, too amateurish.

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