Sherlock

2010fandomclassic

Published September 27, 2026

Sherlock is the BBC's 2010 modern-day reboot of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The show inspired one of the largest television fandoms of the early 2010s, generating enormous volumes of Tumblr fanart, slash fiction and the viral post-Reichenbach "I Believe in Sherlock Holmes" street campaign.

tv show memesfandom shipping memestumblr memesfan fiction memesbritish memes

Overview

Sherlock is a British TV series that drops the Conan Doyle detective stories into contemporary London, with Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes texting suspects from a smartphone and Martin Freeman's John Watson blogging their cases1. Each series runs just three feature-length episodes, a scarcity that helped push the fandom's activity almost entirely online between seasons2.

On Tumblr the show turned into a full ecosystem of gifsets, character analysis and fanart, with popular tags including #Sherlock and #Sherlock BBC and dedicated blogs such as Fuck Yeah, Sherlock rounding up new work2. Shipping the two leads as "Johnlock" became one of the fandom's defining activities, with several deviantART groups and Tumblr tags devoted to the pairing and the show's writers openly nodding to it on-screen2. Fans also compiled a glossary of over 100 in-jokes and pairing names, and FanFiction.net hosted roughly 52,600 Sherlock fics at its peak, ranking it the fourth most-written TV show on the site2.

Outside long-form fanwork, "Sherlock" also lives on as a piece of everyday slang unrelated to the show, most famously in the retort "no shit, Sherlock," used to mock someone stating the obvious3.

Origin & Background

Platform
BBC (source) / Tumblr (viral fandom spread)
Creator
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss; fandom memes by unknown fans
Date
2010

The series was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, both self-identified Sherlock Holmes fans who felt existing screen adaptations were "too reverential and too slow" and wanted a faster, contemporary spin on the canon4. Moffat had previously updated Robert Louis Stevenson for the 2007 BBC drama Jekyll, and Gatiss had written the Dickens-inspired Doctor Who episode The Unquiet Dead, so the pair already had a track record with modernised Victorian source material1.

An unbroadcast pilot was produced in 2009 before the first three episodes aired on BBC One starting in July 2010, followed by a second run of three in January 2012 and a third series that premiered on January 1st, 20141. The show's rollout in short bursts, with long hiatuses between seasons, gave the online fandom room to snowball on Tumblr and deviantART between broadcasts2.

How It Spread

Between the 2010 premiere and the 2014 third series, most Sherlock activity clustered on Tumblr and deviantART. Popular tags such as #Sherlock and #Sherlock BBC anchored the fanbase, dedicated art blogs like Sherlock Holmes Fanart aggregated new pieces, and artists such as Sdkay and Reapersun built large followings off the show2. DeviantArt hosted parallel groups including BBC-Sherlock and Sherlock-2010, plus ship-focused groups Sherlock-Bromance and Holmes-Watson-Slash for Johnlock work2.

The fandom's biggest crossover moment came after the Series 2 finale "The Reichenbach Fall," which ended with Sherlock's apparent suicide. A Tumblr user named Earl Foolish proposed spreading the in-universe rallying cries "I Believe in Sherlock Holmes" and "Moriarty Was Real," and the post pulled over 12,000 notes within a week5. Fans turned the slogans into propaganda posters, chalk graffiti and street-art photos, collected in venues like the deviantArt group Believe-in-Sherlock6.

The show's third season premiered on January 1st, 2014, reigniting fandom output around unresolved Reichenbach theories and fresh episodes1. "Sherlock" also circulates independently of the show as slang: Urban Dictionary entries define it as calling out someone who has just noticed something obvious, most familiar in the phrase "no shit, Sherlock"3.

How to Use This Meme

Sherlock fandom output typically lives on Tumblr as gifsets, meta essays and shipping posts under tags like #Sherlock and #Sherlock BBC, with Johnlock as the dominant pairing name2. After the Series 2 finale, a common convention was to reblog or scrawl the phrases "I Believe in Sherlock Holmes" and "Moriarty Was Real" in-character as an in-universe defender of the detective, often paired with propaganda-style posters or street graffiti5.

Frequently Asked Questions