Steven Moffat has confirmed plans for Sherlock Season 5. While the upcoming fourth season could absolutely still be the last in the detective series, the showrunner tells Collider that he has “ideas” for a potential fifth season:
We have to take it one season at a time. We don’t know what the future will be, and it’s not entirely down to us. Hopefully, we’ll do more. I find it hard to imagine that we won’t. But in terms of a specific plan, there are ideas that we haven’t gotten to yet.
Moffat notes that a fifth series will only happen if there’s more story to tell:
If you get to the point on a show that you feel like you’re done, you’ve probably gone past the point that you should have stopped. You should stop full speed, as it were, and leap off the train while it’s still going, rather than letting it grind to a halt. We won’t do that. We would never do a series of this without it passing our inspection first. We have to be so excited about it, before we start talking to the others. But there are ideas, so who knows? We’ll see.
However, star Benedict Cumberbatch is more cautious about the future beyond Season 4, though he doesn’t rule it out:
We’ll see. We’ll see how [Season 4] lands. It’s been great fun to come back and do it. How it will continue in the future, who knows? It’s not just about what any of us want. It’s about what’s actually right for the show, to be honest, and that has to be judged very carefully. Think about the very limited but classic British output of certain shows, and there aren’t that many of them. It’s a painful thing to say, but maybe Season 4 is it. Who knows? I don’t know. I don’t want to say this is it because we have too much fun doing it. But generally, we have to see how this lands. And the actors aren’t the only ones who are busy. Mark and Steven are pretty tied up. Mark is an actor, as well as a producer and writer. It’s all of us being stretched in different directions. Also, this has run longer than most American series. You don’t want to compromise it by continually doing it, just because we could carry it on. There’s lots of stuff to weigh. It’s not just about what we want to do. It’s about what’s right. We’ll see. Really, we will have to see. No one has decided on it, so there’s no yes or no to an end or a beginning.
Stay tuned as we continue to monitor the renewal status of Sherlock Season 5…
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