Sherlock Producer Denies Benedict Cumberbatch Said Season 4 Is Final Season

With each new season of BBC‘s Sherlock, it’s two main leads, Bendict Cumberbatch (Marvel’s Doctor Strange) and Martin Freeman (Captain America: Civil War), gain more popularity and are offered more projects. And that means, their schedules are getting busier and busier, but they always seem to find time to return to Sherlock. However, based on comments Cumberbatch made two months ago, many fans of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson’s adventures in 21st Century London are expecting the upcoming fourth season to be the show’s curtain call.

“It might be the end of an era,” Cumberbatch told GQ in October. “It feels like the end of an era, to be honest. [Season 4] goes to a place where it will be pretty hard to follow on immediately. We never say never on the show. I’d love to revisit it, I’d love to keep revisiting it, I stand by that. But in the immediate future, we all have things that we want to crack on with and we’ve made something very complete as it is, so I think we’ll just wait and see. The idea of never playing him again is really galling.”

A couple weeks after that interview was published, Cumberbatch told USA Today that he was misquoted, claiming the journalist “tried to make something sensational out of it and create clickbait.”

If you’re need further proof a fifth season of Sherlock is still a possibility, showrunner Steven Moffat recently spoke with EW and he too says Cumberbatch was misquoted. “This is really worth saying because it’s getting exhausting for us all,” he said. “That’s not what Benedict said. That’s what someone edited his words into the meaning of. It seems to be impossible these days not to be misquoted. He was quite specific about being keen to carry on. He went on to say he’s hard to get us all together. We want to keep the quality up. We haven’t even seen this [season air] yet. We don’t know. We haven’t sat down with the intent to anything yet. But we’re always aware that it could be over. But the fact is Benedict did not say that.”

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Sherlock waits to see where Moriarty will make his posthumous move. One mysterious case in particular baffles Scotland Yard, but Sherlock is more interested in a seemingly trivial detail. Why is someone destroying images of the late prime minister Margaret Thatcher? Is there a madman on the loose? Or is there a much darker purpose at work? Something with its roots deep in Mary Watson’s past…

The fourth season of Sherlock will premiere, which is titled “The Six Thatchers,” at 8:30 p.m. on January 1, 2017 on BBC (U.K.) and PBS (North America).