My Dear Watson
2026 | 12 minutes | Comedy, Romance, Family | Directed by Yakov McKee
A teenage Sherlock Holmes gets a love note. He can't solve it. That's the entire premise, and it's stupidly effective — the world's greatest detective meets the one mystery that logic can't crack.
The Setup: A Teenage Detective in Over His Head
My Dear Watson drops you into the obvious irony: Sherlock's deductive powers fail spectacularly when emotions are involved. Someone's left him an anonymous love note, and instead of accepting his feelings like a normal person, he launches a full investigation. The joke practically writes itself — except the film doesn't lean on it as a punchline. It actually commits to the emotional stakes, which is what separates this from a one-liner sketch.
At 12 minutes, there's no room for filler. Every scene has to pull weight. The comedy lives in that gap between Sherlock's analytical confidence and his complete bewilderment at his own heart, and that's a character irony that's been sitting in the source material since 1887, waiting for someone to play it straight (no pun intended).
The tagline — "The gay's afoot" — signals immediately that this isn't coy about its premise. It's a riff on Holmes's "the game is afoot," and it tells you what you're getting before you hit play. That kind of directness matters. You're either in or you're not.
Atlanta Production, Festival Circuit Recognition
Here's what I find interesting: this film exists because someone crowdfunded it on Seed&Spark, got it made in Atlanta, and then won a Jury Award for Best Short Film at ReelOut CLT — a Charlotte-based LGBTQ+ film festival. That's not nothing. Jury awards mean the filmmakers connected emotionally and technically, which is the hardest trick for a comedy that's also trying to be sincere.
Director Yakov McKee shot this through Make Mom Proud productions in Georgia, a state that's quietly become a hub for short-film work. You don't need a $50 million budget to tell a good story — you need discipline and people who care about landing the tone, and the festival response suggests McKee nailed both.
The film also screened through Eventive's virtual program, which expanded its reach beyond a single theater. That's the modern distribution pipeline for shorts: festival win, then digital access, then slow creep onto streaming platforms. Movie OTT tracks exactly this kind of pipeline — short films that pick up jury prizes tend to find their way to platform distribution faster than you'd expect, often bundled into curated short-film collections rather than standalone releases.
Why This Holmes Retelling Actually Works
Look, the Sherlock Holmes IP has been worked. BBC's Sherlock, CBS's Elementary, the Guy Ritchie action films, Enola Holmes — there's been a lot of mining. So a new short film has to earn its place instead of just coasting on the name.
What strikes me about My Dear Watson is that it doesn't try to be meta or clever in the way most adaptations do. No winking references. No elaborate plot machinery. It goes small: teenager, mystery note, crush. That's it. The film understands something crucial — that the best comedy often lives in the smallest emotional truths, not the biggest jokes.
Here's the thing: a 12-minute runtime forces choices. You can't pad scenes. You can't meander. Every moment has to mean something, which is why shorts like this sometimes work better than features twice their length. They know what they are and they commit to it.
Where to Watch My Dear Watson Right Now
My Dear Watson is available on major OTT services — check the Where to Watch widget at the top of this page for current platform availability, which updates regularly as streaming rights shift. Short films sometimes appear as part of curated collections or festival programming blocks rather than standalone titles, so if it's not immediately visible in your platform's main library, look for a dedicated shorts section.
If you're browsing Movie OTT's streaming tracker and don't see it listed yet, that just means the title is still in its festival-to-streaming transition window. It'll land somewhere — these projects always do eventually. The Eventive history shows the film's been made digitally accessible before, which is a good sign for ongoing availability.
Should You Actually Watch This
If you've got 12 minutes and any affection for Sherlock Holmes, teen comedies, or short films that actually know what they're doing, yes. Families with older kids, anyone who likes LGBTQ+ romantic comedies, people who've ever wondered what happens when the world's greatest detective can't deduce his own feelings — this one's built for you.
Don't sleep on it just because it's short. The best shorts don't feel like they're missing something — they feel like someone made exactly the film they wanted to make, no more, no less. This is that kind of project. Queue it up when you've got a quarter hour and a willingness to smile at something genuinely clever.
