# Sherlock 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. ## Origin 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 canon[4]. 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 material[1]. 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, 2014[1]. The show's rollout in short bursts, with long hiatuses between seasons, gave the online fandom room to snowball on Tumblr and deviantART between broadcasts[2]. - **Platform:** BBC (source) / Tumblr (viral fandom spread) - **Creator:** Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (series creators); fandom memes by unknown fans - **Date:** 2010 ## 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 cases[1]. Each series runs just three feature-length episodes, a scarcity that helped push the fandom's activity almost entirely online between seasons[2]. 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 work[2]. 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-screen[2]. 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 site[2]. 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 obvious[3]. ## 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 show[2]. DeviantArt hosted parallel groups including BBC-Sherlock and Sherlock-2010, plus ship-focused groups Sherlock-Bromance and Holmes-Watson-Slash for Johnlock work[2]. 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 week[5]. Fans turned the slogans into propaganda posters, chalk graffiti and street-art photos, collected in venues like the deviantArt group Believe-in-Sherlock[6]. The show's third season premiered on January 1st, 2014, reigniting fandom output around unresolved Reichenbach theories and fresh episodes[1]. "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 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 name[2]. 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 graffiti[5]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Sherlock? Sherlock is a BBC television series that updates Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories to present-day London, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman[1]. ### Where did Sherlock come from? Moffat and Gatiss developed the show as a fast, modern take on the Holmes canon after deciding existing adaptations were too slow and reverential, with an unaired 2009 pilot preceding the July 2010 BBC premiere[4]. ### What does Sherlock mean? In fandom contexts it refers to the BBC series and its Tumblr/deviantART community, but as slang, calling someone "Sherlock" mocks them for pointing out something obvious, as in "no shit, Sherlock"[3]. ### How do you use Sherlock? Fans typically post gifsets, art and Johnlock shipping content under #Sherlock and #Sherlock BBC on Tumblr, and after Series 2 many spread the slogans "I Believe in Sherlock Holmes" and "Moriarty Was Real" online and as street art[5]. ### Is Sherlock still popular? The show is treated as a classic 2010s TV fandom, with a large archive of Tumblr tags, deviantART groups and roughly 52,600 fics on FanFiction.net accumulated during its run[2]. ## References 1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes]() 2. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sherlock]() 3. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sherlock]() 4. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/18/sherlock-holmes-is-back-bbc]() 5. [http://www.sherlockology.com/episodes/pilot]() 6. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unquiet_Dead]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/sherlock Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library