'Sherlock' 2018? How About 'The Child In Time' Instead

Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fans will be sadly disappointed to learn the wait for another season of the BBC's modernized Sherlock will continue with no end in sight. (Supposing, that is, that there is another season of Sherlock to come. Nothing's guranteed as yet.) While Cumberbatch  appear on the Masterpiece docket this year for PBS, it's not as the world's greatest, and sometimes most irritating, detective. Instead, he's bringing a potentially far more interesting television proposition to the States: the small-screen adaptation of Ian McEwan's award-winning novel The Child In Time.

He stars in it with Boardwalk Empire's Kelly Macdonald, playing estranged couple Stephen and Julie Lewis, whose marriage fell apart after the kidnapping of their only daughter, four-year-old Kate. Unlike Sherlock, which is an action thriller, Lewis' story, and his processing of the grief he feels at the loss of his daughter is a far more quiet and introspective drama than we might be used to from Cumberbatch.

Speaking via satellite from London at the annual winter edition of the Television Critics Association press tour, Cumberbatch talked about what drew him to the role:

"This is a study of a moment of experiencing that cold sweat, that heart in mouth, that horrendous horror of 'it's happened, your child is missing,' and how that then affects you after. How do you live with that? How do you deal with that?"

Despite the subject matter, he and McDonald kept it lighthearted, with McDonald complaining that despite her best efforts to make friends with the child playing their daughter in flashbacks, she was far more partial to Cumberbatch.