�鶹��ý

Here, instead of approaching medicine in a straightforward manner, he looks upon it as a mystery. Because it’s based on the Sherlock Holmes saga, it also has an overriding crime to solve.

“This is one of the first times where we’re doctors and detectives,” Chestnut says. His past tours of duty – in “Nurse Jackie,” “Rosewood” and “The Resident” – were more traditional.

In the series, Watson has established the Holmes Clinic in Pittsburgh after the death of Sherlock Holmes by the hands of Moriarty. The venture is designed to treat patients with strange and unidentifiable issues. In the meantime, he hopes to discover what motivated Holmes’ killer.

His team – an eclectic mix of specialists – has the kind of expertise that can get at clues others may have missed.

For creator Craig Sweeny, the blend of medicine and mystery was ideal (“It fit me like a comfortable shoe”) and drew on his past with series like “Elementary,” “Medium” and “Limitless.” “The show’s medical godfather is a geneticist…which allows us to write about the vanguard of medicine in a way that, hopefully, is fun.”

Already, the actors say, they’ve been able to play the medicine game with friends and family. Inga Schlingmann, who plays a rheumatology specialist, frequently discusses scripts with her husband, who’s an infectious diseases doctor.

“It enhances our relationship,” she says. “When you’re an actor and your partner is not, it’s kind of hard to bridge the gap outside of watching shows.”

Rochelle Aytes and Eve Harlow, other members of the team, say they’ve tossed medical phrases in conversations and, says Aytes, “feel a lot smarter.”

When Peter Mark Kendall visits a doctor, “I just go in assuming I have all the years of medical school training and speak to them like an equal. I obviously know very, very little, so not much has changed.”

Kendall, who plays twins in the series, says the assignment has been one of the most challenging in his career. “Essentially, we film one side of it where I’m playing one character, and we have a wonderful acting double who learns all the lines that I have and he plays the other character and then we switch. It can be tedious, but I think it’s really, really exciting.”

That overarching story – the case of Holmes’ killer – continues throughout the season, giving audiences another level of gamesmanship. The story will be completed in the first season.

“My favorite kind of season is one that would tell a complete story,” Sweeny says. “And when you came back, it was a new thing, a new challenge for the characters.”

Details, naturally, are on a need-to-know basis.

When the actors met with Sweeny he gave them details others didn’t get. “He gave me a little bit of information to help explain the relationship between Watson and (me) and then I waited until I got the script because I like to be surprised,” says Aytes.

The process was the best of all worlds, Kendall adds. They got some big picture ideas but also “a caveat that it could change. Sometimes it did. But it’s also a gift to experience the story in real time, as you would in real life. You don’t know how to prepare for things that are coming down two weeks from now, so you get to be just as surprised as the audience.”

For Sweeny, “Watson” is a way to tip his hat to his mother, who worked in the organ transplant division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“She wasn’t a doctor, but what she instilled in me and my brother was this respect for science and this enormous awe she had for these people she was working with,” Sweeny says. “Dr. Thomas Starzl, who was really the innovator of transplantation, and Dr. John Fung were huge to us as kids. I always had the sense that the highest and best thing you could do was to be a doctor, not just because it would get you a nice house, but you’d be helping people and advancing what’s possible.”

Mom, he says, would have gotten a kick out of the show “and that means a whole hell of a lot to me.”

For Chestnut, “Watson” is a new page in his medical book. “All of the medicine on this show has been vetted by professionals,” he says. “We’ve been able to combine elements in a way that hasn’t been on a procedural, one-hour show.”

“Watson” previews Jan. 26 then begins in its regular time period Feb. 16 on CBS.