This is a Holmes knocked from the pedestal of the dispassionate gentleman detective. His relationship with his addiction forms the core of his character, of secondary importance only to Watson in his development throughout the season. And Jonny Lee Miller’s fantastic incarnation of Holmes makes sure we feel the weight of addiction in a show that takes it seriously. He suffers the aftermath, and must face the realities of recovery — no easy thing for a man who trades on the illusion of invincibility with all the gusto of the Conan Doyle original.

Also keeping him humble: his supporting cast. There’s a popular misconception — the fault of many an adaptation — that Holmes is a supergenius accompanied by an admiring everyman and surrounded by dunces. Conan Doyle’s Watson and Gregson would beg to differ, and so this Holmes lives in no such vacuum; he’s never the only clever person in a room. When he reveals his addiction, Gregson (not unkindly) points out that as a detective, he had that covered. His sponsor Alfredo’s skills in the repossessionary arts outclass Holmes’s by a mile. He acknowledges Moriarty as more than a match for himself. Even housekeeper/librarian Ms. Hudson has the effortless memory to which Holmes aspires.

And in Watson, he’s found an equal — and that’s what the show’s not-so-secretly about.

When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?” and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.” I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.

You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.