Brace yourselves, Sherlock might be coming back

After a uniquely terrible final season, Sherlock might actually be coming back.

Producer Sue Vertue just made some extremely interesting comments about the show at the Amazon Prime Video Trailblazers event. While walking the blue carpet, she was asked about Sherlock by Deadline and she said, “We love that show and there is a future for it. One day. Maybe. If everyone wants to do it.”

She went on, “I’ve still got the set in storage somewhere, which is probably rotten, to be honest with you. It’s just getting everybody aligned, it’s getting the actors to want to do it.”

The Sherlock finale was uniquely awful

The Sherlock finale involved a fringing, a secret evil sister, a round of deadly games, and absolutely none of what the internet was calling “Johnlock”. Yep, the supposed romantic relationship of Sherlock and John Watson never happened all, despite conspiracy theories that writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss had been leaving secret hints towards it. Shippers were livid. It was incredible.

At the time, the final episode wasn’t terribly well-received by professional critics, either. They focused less on Johnlock (in fact, not at all) but more on the fact that it was a confusing, illogical mess. “The main character has a secret, evil sister with superpowers” is just not a good way to end a show, never mind how good the actors were.

Time has not been kind to Sherlock. These days, people are baffled by the hold the first few seasons had over British TV fans and 2013-era Tumblr fandom. It’s remembered as being a self-indulgent, frustrating show that treated its female characters terribly. (Yep, a very sexualized Irene Adler falls for Sherlock! Groundbreaking.) On the whole, not many people outside of hardcore fandom circles really seem to miss it that much.

The actors in question

So… would the actors want to do it? The two people the show couldn’t do without are Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman as Watson, and Cumberbatch’s answer as of May 2024 was a simple, “Never say never.” Course, he’s busy being Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe right now, but if the pay was good enough…

And Martin Freeman has said that “the door is never shut” on a possible Sherlock revival. He’s appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe too, but not to the extent that Cumberbatch has, and while he’s a sought-after actor in the UK he doesn’t seem to be doing anything overly huge right now.

So if the stars eventually align to bring Cumberbatch, Freeman, Moffat, Gatiss and Vertue back together, there could very conceivably be more Sherlock one day. And an announcement of that magnitude would break Tumblr forever.