The stars of BBC’s Sherlock are very busy men these days. Benedict Cumberbatch was just in 12 Years a Slave and has a relatively full dance card going forward, and Martin Freeman is on Bilbo duty for The Hobbit and just wrapped up his excellent turn as Minnesota miscreant Lester Nygaard on Fargo. (“The Minnesota Miscreant” is a good name for a boxer, btw. My gift to you.) As a result of their flourishing careers, as well as the busy schedules of creators Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatniss, Sherlock has been essentially on ice since production wrapped on Series 3, with Series 4 set to shoot at some undetermined point well into the future.
According to a very forthcoming Freeman, however, who has teased the idea of a one-off special between seasons in the past, there may be something in the works: A Christmas special. In 2015. From The Telegraph:
The BBC likes to keep all announcements about Sherlock shrouded in secrecy.
But Freeman told the Telegraph that a period of filming in early 2015 “looks pretty likely”.
“If that’s going to be a special – I’m speaking off-message here; if this was New Labour I’d get fired – I think that might be for next Christmas. A Christmas special. That’s what I understand,” he said, indicating that a full-blown series is unlikely.
He also said this about the character his real-life wife plays, Mary Morstan, who is Watson’s wife on the show, and it is either an incredibly large spoiler or common knowledge, depending how you feel about plot developments from books that were written so long ago that the majority of the information in them is now in the public domain.
“While we play fast and loose with the original stories, we generally follow the trajectory of what Conan Doyle did. So he [Watson] gets married, and then Mary dies – so at some point presumably she’ll die,” Freeman said.
So there’s that, too.
Anyway, yes, 18 months is a horrendously long time to wait for a single new episode of a TV show (or anything, for that matter), but on the bright side, it does give everyone who hasn’t seen the show yet plenty of time to rip through the entire series on Netflix. Silver linings and so on and so forth.
