I once thought that Basil Rathbone was the ultimate Holmes, but Jeremy Brett won me over. Plus, the Brett series was far truer to the original stories, sometimes word for word. Too bad his health was failing after the second season.
It is unfortunate that Paul Simon has retired. He is truly as worthy as Bob Dylan for the Nobel. JMHO.
Jeremy Brett was my absolute favorite. The show was true to the time period, too. I have BritBox on Amazon Prime and go back and watch every episode periodically.
The new series with Benedict Cumberbatch (a lefty wackjob) is pretty good. Has the basis of Sherlock, Watson, and others applied to current day.
No TV/movie adaption comes close to reading the original stories. The wit, the irony, the sarcasm woven into the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cannot be approached by the film format. Why waste your time (a limited commodity, all things considered) with second-hand attempts?
The David Hardwicke and early Edward Burke episodes are the best of the Jeremy Brett turns as Holmes. And probably the best episodes of any other series or movies ever made.
But I thought the series with Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock in the mid-60’s was uniformly excellent. The Speckled Band, Charles Augustus Milverton, The Ilustrious Client, and The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfox are stories I return to again and again. And that is not even half a truly fine run of episodes.
I liked Peter Cushing as Holmes as well when he picked up where Wilmer left off. But the production and writing overall took a hit, despite being recorded in color, and the surviving episodes from that series are comparitively disappointing. The standout from that series is The Blue Carbuncle, which I’d put up against Brett’s, as great as it is.
If you’re like me and enjoy watching how others portray Holmes, there is a series out of the old Soviet Union made in the late 70’s through early 80’s that I am sure spurred Granada to do their series with Brett. Uneven but always entertaining, it suffers from dark and muddy film prints that suffered in their translation to video. The Adventure of the Empty House is probably the best of that series.