Sherlock Meets The BBC's Other Great Detectives In This Fun, Weird Promo

Mashup video edits are universal favorites among fans, and have been for ages. Wars and Trek? Sure. DC’s live action movies and TV shows in one trailer? Fantastic! The BBC mashing up its hit crime shows Sherlock, Luther, and The Fall? Okay that’d be—wait, hold the phone, what??

So, we wouldn’t usually cover the thought of a crossover between myriad British crime dramas—you know, unless they happened to cross over with Sleepy Hollow for no particular reason whatsoever. But the idea of the BBC—the actual BBC, not a fan—doing its own edit mashup to make it look like Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Idris Elba, and Gillian Anderson are reprising their roles as Sherlock, Watson, John Luther (from Luther), and Stella Gibson (from The Fall) for a short trailer is both charming and also kind of insane.

I mean, they pay these actors. They probably could’ve asked them to show up and do a little something. The fact that they’ve spliced footage from their respective TV shows to do it instead is oddly endearing. It has the feel of a fan edit (a really well done fan edit), too, and yet knowing it’s an official teaser for the corporation’s upcoming drama series—not an actual crossover, which would be all kinds of wonderful—adds this bizarre bent to it all. We live in interesting times, everyone.

Plus, in a roundabout way, you could secretly imagine this is a mashup where Doctor Strange, Bilbo Baggins, Dana Scully and the new villain of Star Trek Beyond team up to solve murders in a police AU. I’m not sure if that makes it better or not.