Steven Moffat confident in Sherlock season 5 renewal — eventually

For everyone out there wondering, Steven Moffat remains as committed as ever to there being a Sherlock season 5. He just doesn’t envision it happening in the near future.

While speaking out to the Radio Times recently, the show co-creator offered up a variation on one of his very-familiar refrains when it comes to the show, including the main reason why you’re not going to be seeing new episodes over the next couple of years:

“I vaguely assume we will do it again at some point. I don’t think it will be very soon. It’s due a longer gap … It is still enormously successful, so there will always be a demand for it, I hope. And there is no upper limit on how long we can do it. Holmes and Watson can be 60 or 70.”

Obviously, we don’t presume that the wait between Sherlock seasons will be decades, but there are two prime examples out there at the moment of just how long the wait between seasons could be. Curb Your Enthusiasm just wrapped up its ninth season on HBO, and that came after a long hiatus of six years. Meanwhile, last year Netflix premiered Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, a four-part limited series that took place more than nine years after the original series came off the air. If these two shows can come back after a long wait, so can Sherlock and neither one of them had at the end of their prior seasons the same sort of universal love that Benedict Cumberbatch and company do.

There’s absolutely a bounty of source material out there for Moffat and Mark Gatiss to adapt, and we imagine that most of the supporting characters would be keen on returning. Given that Gatiss plays Mycroft, it shouldn’t be all that hard to make that return happen – which would make us here at CarterMatt extremely happy about since we are massive Mycroft fans.

If we had to guess right now, we’d wage that a Sherlock season 5 in 2020 or 2021 seems like something that could transpire — that would be four or five years after the third season, and while that’s long it’s not anywhere near as long of a wait as the one with Gilmore Girls. Maybe it would also give Moffat some time to address one of the biggest issues that Sherlock had during season 4: Being overly complicated at times when it didn’t need to be.

While you wait for a Sherlock season 5 renewal to happen someday, we suggest heading over here to read more of the latest.

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