Steven Moffat publicly pleas for Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman to return to Sherlock
BBC's Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat will only return if his stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman do
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If Tumblr really does make a comeback, it seems only fitting that BBC’s Sherlock, too, would stage its return. After all, we’ve still got Doctor Who and the Supernatural spin-off The Winchesters (for now). The game is still afoot, my boys, and the world still needs you! Or at least, showrunner Steven Moffat does.
Moffat told Deadline that he would “start writing tomorrow” if a fifth season of the mystery series was greenlit, but only if stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman signed on. “They’re on to bigger and better things but, Martin and Benedict, ‘please come back?’” the writer joked.
This has been Moffat’s recurring line about the show, though he acknowledged to the Radio Times in April 2022 that it was “fair enough” if the actors wanted to bow out since “they were very loyal to that show over a very long life when it definitely became their lowest paying job.”
As for the crime-solving duo themselves, who have since become varying levels of Marvel stars, neither seem particularly enthused about returning. But it’s not a hard “no”: while Freeman is “a fan of things being finite,” he said on The Jonathan Ross Show in November that he’s “also a sucker for a good idea and a good script.” He added, “If something comes up that persuades us all—it would have to be us all—then my door would always be open.”
Similarly, in 2021 Cumberbatch said to Esquire, “Oh look, I still say never say never. You know, I really like that character… it’s just, the circumstances need to be right and I think maybe it’s too soon now to see it have another life. I think, wonderful as it is, it’s had its moment for now. But that’s not to say it wouldn’t have another iteration in the future.”
As it happens, there may be lots of new iterations of Sherlock for the BBC series to contend with if it ever returns. The famed detective finally entered public domain in the United States as of January 2023 (per Forbes). If you thought there was already a glut of Arthur Conan Doyle adaptations on the market, well, now Hollywood can adapt the character for free. Perhaps one will emerge to fill the hole in mystery fans’ hearts left by Moffat’s version.
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Not after that horrendous fourth series. Unwatchable.
it’d be hard to write a worse ending than the one this show gave us I guess. honestly it should have ended with Reichenbach Fall which was genuinely fantastic, but I’d watch a comeback if they fucked around and brought Andrew Scott back as Moriarty somehow. goddamn he was great
Yeah it was definitely a case of a solid series that went on way too long, with the characteristic intricately-plotted Moffat stuff becoming the characteristic convoluted Moffat stuff. It doesn’t need more.
its kind of funny that Moffat’s Doctor Who follows the reverse trajectory to his Sherlock, where it starts out insanely complicated and labyrinthine with Smith and then gradually peels back the layers until we’re left with a fairly simple, character-focused, arc-light last few seasons with Capaldi, which is by far the best era of anything Moffat has written
“Somehow, Moriarty returned.” Just have Oscar Isaac say it and a new series is off to the races.
I was never a huge fan of his Sherlock. The best Sherlock is still Jeremy Brett and the best Moffat is Peter Capaldi-era Doctor Who. The Matt Smith years were frankly a bit of a mess, for a lot of the same reasons his Sherlock was a bit of a mess.
At some point I need to watch a 20th Century Sherlock Holmes adaptation, all the Sherlock’s I’ve seen have been 21st Century. (House, Monk, Elementary, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Sherlock and well according to my dad The Mentalist is basically Sherlock Holmes but played by an Australian.)Out of all of the Sherlock Holmes adaptations it goes to me.1. Jonny Lee Miller2. Yuko Takeuchi3. Robert Downey Jr4. Benedict Cumberbatch. (Mainly because of how dire the last few Sherlocks were.)But my favourite Sherlock adaptation is of course Sherlock by SHINee.
The best Sherlock is the fake Sherlock in Without a Clue.
Personally I’d go with the Sherlock Holmes from Murder by Death.
YES BY GOD PBS NEEDS TO RE-RUN THE BRETT HOLMES DURING PLEDGE DRIVES. I, Claudius too.
I said the same thing about Jeremy Brett a couple days ago. He carried charisma, wit, charm, and the diabolical all at the same time in his portrayal.
Considering the diminishing returns of each series after the first, maybe it’s best if they don’t come back.
I don’t know, I thought A Scandal in Belgravia and The Hounds of Baskerville from series 2 were two of the best episodes. And even though The Reichenbach Fall had its issues, it also gave us plenty of Andrew Scott as Moriarty, which more than made of for some of the weaknesses of the episode. Things went rapidly downhill is series 3, though. The less said about series 4, the better.
I think I was combining series 1 and 2 in my head a bit. Though I remember really disliking The Hounds of Baskerville.
Without making the last two seasons some sort of fever dream, I have no idea how they could possibly salvage this franchise.
Considering the 9.1 rating Sherlock has on IMDB I am trying not to just sound like a contrarian by pointing out that the show is actually pretty bad. Not to take one low-point and make it stand in (the unbelievably hackneyed “Sherlock is the real menace to society” storyline could as well…it wasn’t exactly “In a Lonely Place” let’s say), but I will never ever get over that they had a website called idatedaghost.com
Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about how it always takes me one or two attempts to plug in my phone charger, and how Sherlock would extrapolate that to me being an alcoholic rather than just generally uncoordinated.
Peak “dumb show cosplaying as smart” energy.
Also, I’ll never forgive Moffat for taking Doctor Who from “This is Rose. Rose works a menial job and longs for something more. Her character arc will be finding out whether that life of adventure is what she really wants, and whether she and the Doctor are good for each other” to “This is River Song. She is the secret time baby of two companions, conceived in the Tardis so she’s got weird timelord shit, captured by weird space nuns to be a time-traveling assassin that kills the Doctor and sent back to be her own mother’s best friend to get close to him.”
This isn’t smart Moffat, it’s just complicated. Please learn the difference.
This isn’t smart Moffat, it’s just complicated.God, you did it! You broke his hackneyed writing and inability to stick the landing down to it’s bare essentials!
It’s fair to not like it but I wouldn’t want to see the exact same companion story everytime. I liked that he shook it up a bit.
I’d actually argue that he -didn’t- shake it up at all. At least Chibnall, abysmal writer that he is, actually decided to do a Team Tardis with multiple people who weren’t all traditionally pretty white women from modern settings.
I like Clara, I love Bill, it’s not all dire on the Moffat side of the companions. But I spent his entire run praying we’d get anything interesting about the next companion – an alien, someone from the past, hell I’d even take just a man being a companion for a while. But I’m so tired of Moffat’s manic pixie time girls.
we literally got a male alien from the future and a woman of colour as his last primary companions, and they were fucking great, so I’m not sure this complaint really holds up nowalso, reminder that Victorian Clara was intended to be the main one and actually travel with the Doctor but someone at the BBC balked at this and forced Moffat to make her modern instead
Huh, I didn’t know that about Victorian Clara, I would have liked that quite a bit more.
I remember we got Nardole and Bill for a season each, and they were both breaths of fresh air (especially Bill, tied for Donna for my number one companion) but it still took us a damn long time to get there and they only stuck around for a blip each.
I get what you’re saying, but in my opinion it’s a quality game over quantity. I feel like I knew more about Bill and found her more fleshed out after 3 episodes than Yaz was after 3 years. I do applaud Chibnall for giving us more diverse faces on Doctor Who, but his era feels very performatively progressive while actually being super backwards when you really dig into the politics of it just compare Kerblam’s wholehearted defense of Space Amazon to the outright takedown of capitalism in Oxygen in Capaldi’s last season. Moffat’s era can seem hella white on first glance, and there’s certainly a lot to take issue with in how he writes women (especially in the Smith era) but dude has some genuinely progressive politics and he baked them into the show in a way Chibnall threatened to but never followed up on
Oh, we are totally in agreement there. For as much shit as I give, gave, will continue to give to Moffat, at least his seasons are still watchable. He’s a great moment-to-moment writer who fumbles on the big stuff, but that’s exactly 100% more strengths than Chris has.
Also, because I’m very high and feeling weirdly bad about being mean to Chris Chibnall, I do think his seasons of Doctor Who look noticeably better than his predecessors. His push to use more modern equipment and techniques paid off.
you know, far be it from me to defend Sherlock, a show that was mostly stylish garbage, but in the original story Holmes noted scratches on a pocket watch from its winding key, and extrapolated the same conclusion. moffat and gatiss had a lot of bad ideas, but in their very mild defense that particular bad idea was arthur conan doyle’s
Huh, I didn’t know that! Very interesting. Very dumb, but very interesting.
I don’t think it was that bad an idea, in the context of the story. Conan Doyle believed in heightened instincts—superficially “lucky guesses”—but he understood that readers wouldn’t need to completely buy Sherlock’s explanations if they were willing to accept Watson’s words as those of a relative simpleton. Have you ever read any of the stories narrated by Holmes? They are perfectly forgettable. Of course this may be in part because the central mysteries are far less compelling—but can you imagine even the best stories working without the odd-couple aspect? I can’t.
I mean…Conan Doyle believed in fairy photography, so being a dummy doesn’t disqualify one from writing good Sherlock, lolBut on top of the show being pretty terrible, they have burned through most of the major plotlines they could do and burned the bridges behind them. I checked and apparently the Irene Adler character is at least not dead, so I guess they could do something with that
It’s very funny to me that any adult ever believed in fucking fairy photography, much less an otherwise very smart person.
Eh, smart people believe stupid shit all the time. Being smart—at least the sort of “smart” we tend to value in society—isn’t about being able to sort fact from fiction so much as being able to come up with very convincing explanations for why whatever you believe is true.
The fact that he believed in fairy photography is sort of a guiding principle of skepticism to me, it comes to mind at least every few months…what a schmuck. As I recall The Lost World was pretty fun also
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Doyle’s wife, Jean, claimed to be a medium, and he was friends with Houdini, who was notoriously skeptical. Jean offered to contact Houdini’s dead mother and use automatic writing to convey the message. And she did. She drew a cross at the top of the page and wrote a long message to Houdini.Of course, Houdini’s mother was Jewish, and didn’t speak English. Whoops.
Do you know anything about Conan Doyle’s involvement in the case of George Edalji?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Edalji
It’s very funny to me that any adult ever believed in fucking fairy photography, much less an otherwise very smart person.
Doyle was someone who wanted to believe – and he had a mess of trauma in his life, so… understandable, sort of. He was into spiritualism and ghosts and such, and believed that Houdini had psychic powers (even though Houdini told Doyle he did not…)
But my gosh – take a look at the Cottingsley photos. Even for the early days of photography, it is so hard to imagine seeing them as real.
Lots of people believed the Cottingley photos were real at the time. What are you talking about?
Every single time I blindly fumble trying to plug my charger in at night, after I’ve turned the lights off and finally stopped scrolling through Twitter, it takes me a good 20 seconds to get it and I always, invariably, think to myself, “Sherlock was full of shit.”
it’s the kind of show that appeals to someone who goes out of their way to rate something on imdb.also like, the rabid online fanbase that all gave it 10/10s in their early 20s are not coming back to imdb to revise their opinion now that they’re in their early 30s.
I appreciate how savage that analysis is, and it sounds spot on
I wouldn’t say it was “bad” per se. But it certainly had more downs than ups. Every season there was basically one great episode, one mediocre one, and one terrible one, is my recollection (I haven’t watched it in awhile). So it was thoroughly average, overall.
Even though we got a lot of eye-rolling exercise, my wife and i found it engaging enough to be enjoyable. Would we have stuck it out if my wife weren’t in Cumberbatch’s thrall? Hard to say. But she was and is, so we did.
That’s mostly down to the performances – especially the two leads that Moffat is right to consider irreplaceable, but also Una Stubbs, Mark Gatiss, and oh my gods Andrew Scott.
They were given roughly equal parts silly and sparkling things to say, and they delivered all of it delightfully.
We’d watch the whole stupid thing again starting tonight, if we had the time, and schedule the DVR for new episodes. It’s dumb fun, like the source material.
I mean I wouldn’t put Andrew Scott in the trailer too much ahem
The first 2 seasons of this Sherlock show were absolutely the best. It stretched a bit on S3, but I’d love the original team back together again with some good cases to solve.
I’ll never forgive the show for 1) refusing to explain how Holmes survived the Reichenbach fall and 2) openly mocking fans for trying to come up with their own explanations. At that point it became obvious that show wasn’t interested in mysteries so much as mystery-adjacent melodrama.
It started out well and then went off a cliff. It’s hard to write tight whodunnits and science-based mysteries, so they ultimately become trope-laden and stupid.
The first series where they were making clever updates and twists to the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries was really enjoyable but after that, it just started to feel like it was becoming a parody of itself.
yeah but even the very first one the killer is a rando and is like “now I’m going to sit you down and explain it to you but it’s actually quite boring really”
Villains monologuing is a trope and this show was very trope-y, but the killer explaining his whole plan did happen in the book, too.
their responses: blah blah blah blah…no.
I liked the first two series but I quit watching after that.
You really don’t need to watch any further.Series 3 was OK, but started to become more about the characters than the mysteries.The Holiday Special was actually pretty good.Series 4 was absolutely awful. They should have never killed off Moriarty so early, and the later plot lines of him still manipulating things after he died, somehow, were utter garbage.
I couldn’t remember when I stopped, but this makes me realize it was after S3. I know I disliked it so much I skipped the next season, and it sounds like that was a good call.
Also, I think we all would have been okay if an episode started with the message “We know Moriarty was killed off, but that was a huge mistake, so he’s back again. We’re not writing an explanation into the show as to how or why, let’s just go with it.”Andrew Scott was SO much fun in that role.
Well, I hear Benedict might be in need of some cash soon, but you can’t be a slave to rumor.
Please for the love of God just let this show die. This is coming from someone who was 16 when the first series aired back in 2010 and instantly became completely obsessed with the show, even running a semi popular Tumblr blog dedicated to it for over 5 years. Revisiting it recently as an almost 30 year old has made me realize just how bad this show was. Not just the last two series but the entire show. I could go into detail about everything wrong with it but it really just boils down to Moffat being a bad writer. Okay maybe ‘bad’ is a bit harsh, some of my favorite Doctor Who episodes were his stand alone ones, but he is terrible at writing a coherent overarching plot that runs through an entire series of television. The only way I could ever see Sherlock returning to TV and being somewhat semi-decent would be if they found an entirely new writer, but I doubt Moffat would ever let someone else take over.
I’d watch it if they turned it into sci-fi. Might as well at this point. Let’s get a hologram Moriarti along with some jokes about how Star Trek already did that. Eurus runs the world now and Holmes and Watson are on the run and hiding or something. They already made it completely ridiculous, might as well lean in. Mycroft is now just a head on a little robot spider body. Watson’s cane conceals a laser sword. Sherlock is wearing the deerstalker hat now because it has a little helicopter in it so he can fly around. Just go to town.
Just do a live action adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century?
Can there be a multiverse series starring every single living person that’s portrayed Moriarty, Sherlock, Mycroft and Watson? The final episode just ends with Oscar Isaac sighing regretfully to the camera as it turns out to be a story he was telling to Ethan Hawke on the Moon Knight set?
This is just Person of Interest
HBO Japan did Miss Sherlock, a version with a female Sherlock, played by Yuko Takeuchi. It was eight episodes, six of which were okay, but it didn’t end very well. Sadly Miss Takeuchi took her own life two years ago.
I thought the reason Season 4 was so bad was so people would stop asking for more of the show.
They have to find a good novel writer to pen a solid mystery (or buy the rights to one), then find a good screenplay writer to develop it as a show, then find a director up to the level of that cast. Do NOT let a “showrunner” (or an actor – looking at you Elizabeth Moss) turn it in to an ego project. This thing ended so incredibly poorly they just need to retcon the franchise and start fresh.
I mean I think Sherlock’s not going to happen if Freeman wants a good Script and they’re wanting Moffat to do a good script when ever since Blink he’s just delivered shite after shite. Like Stephen Moffat is the biggest hack in showbiz history and that’s no joke.
Oh
Just because I like nitpicking: “pleas” is a noun, “pleads” is a verb. Moffat “pleads” for them to come back.
Uh… “Pleas” is a noun. “Pleads” is the verb you’re looking for.
The last season wasn’t very good, IIRC, and it’s been ages. Has that ship sailed? Will they conjure up another unheard of sibling to muck things up?
Sherlock was never a good show, but it got a lot more fun in the later seasons when they admitted everyone was just there to fart around with their friends on camera. Mofftiss knew it wasn’t deep. They were having fun.
So if Sherlock Holmes just entered public domain does that mean that Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate was making money and having approval over the BBC series, and the Enola Holmes books/movies and the RDJ movies, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
Bring back Cumberbatch and Freeman but have them play Gently and MacDuff from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency instead.
If they had ended after Season 3, I could see folks clamoring for more. But Season 4 left everything on a bad note.
this Sherlock series was a load of shit. great actors but terrible writing.