This should just serve as a reminder, because I honestly forgot: Sherlock Season 4 begins airing on New Year’s Day, two Sundays from now. British viewers and American viewers get to see it on the same day, which is nice, although I think the Brits get it hours ahead of the Americans, so no spoilers, you guys. These are photos from the BBC’s premiere event in London last night. Benedict Cumberbatch wore a nice suit and looked like an undertaker. Martin Freeman wore a denim jacket and looked rather cute. Remember, this is the season where Sherlock hangs out with a bloodhound. This is also the season where Mary (Watson’s wife) has a baby, so Sherlock is sort of an uncle.
A few months back, Benedict said some words and some people thought he was basically saying that Season 4 might be the last of Sherlock, although producers came out pretty quickly and said no, that they’re keeping everything open-ended and that worst case scenario, these will be the last episodes for a few years. At the event last night, Bendy talked a bit more about all of that:
Benedict doesn’t want to read fan-theories: “I think I would be pretty affected by what I read or saw, so I stay clear of that. I can’t have too many voices and influences. I have to trust my directors and writers and actors to make what we’re making. Reaction veers passionately in every direction with this subject and character. Some of that does get back to me – but hopefully that’s the nicer stuff.”
The opening episode, called “The Six Thatchers.” Benedict says the season is “darker than the previous three” and “goes to extremes”. “It tests the bounds of the relationships you’ve come to know and it redefines who those characters are. It starts off with a smile and gets dark as oil.”
This season is not the end: “You have to see these three stories (in series four) to understand what I originally said, which was that it feels like something comes to a head in this series. That’s not just false advertising. As we have always said, we never say never. Enjoy what’s coming now, rather than what may or may not be coming in the future.”
I do wonder if Benedict is a little bit “over” Sherlock at this point. I think the series is fun to make for Benedict and Martin, but both actors have so much other stuff going on, and it must be difficult for them to carve out five months every few years for Sherlock. Plus, it does feel like after Season 3 and the Christmas special (which was pretty bad), people just aren’t as into the series anymore. We’ll see. I mean, I’m going to watch Season 4, but my expectations are kind of low.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
Huge Sherlock fan. Disappointed to read this… it’s a great show and the acting is brilliant! If I’m over Sherlock, it’s because I have to wait so flipping long for new episodes. Never watched the Christmas special though.
Agree 100%
I love the show too. My fave is the actor that play Moriarty. I sm also sentimental as the show is attached to Christmas in our household, along with Love Actually and watching reruns of Fawlty Towers.
Imho Sherlock jumped the shark after he came back from his fake death. The first couple of episodes where really clever and entertaining but the quality hasn’t been the same since season three.
Yeah, I agree. It’s still enjoyable, but not quite the same.
And yet, that scenario is what Conan Doyle wrote in the first place when Sherlock’s fans were upset that he fell off of Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty. So, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame Doyle.
As The Recluse says, that’s doyle not moffat’s handiwork. Integral part of Sherlock history, his returning to life – and by that i don’t mean Moffat or Cumby history. Fan clubs were at least as powerful back then in the day of pen and ink as today with tumblr and twitter and whatnot. Pretty cool.
I was over it after the first episode. Never understood the appeal of either actor (and he basically ruined Kahn)
Now Elementary! JLM is one hell of a fine actor 🙂 and Lucy! Why bother with Sherlock when you can just watch Elementary?
I much prefer Elementary. So much fun.
It’s funny. Whenever my husband and I mention SHERLOCK, my sister thinks we are talking about ELEMENTARY, which she loves. We remain SHERLOCK fans, but the show has the challenge of any show. What are they going to do next? Some people found the ABOMINABLE BRIDE to be a disappointment.
I found The Abominable Bride to be abominable.
I still can’t believe TAB got an Emmy. Just a mess.
I like Elementary a lot, but I really wish it was a shorter seasoned show on another network. The actors are brilliant, the basic retelling is great and a lot of the cases are fairly interesting. But what with it being a CBS procedural there’s always about 10 episodes a season that feel like they could belong to any old procedural with only the most minor changes, and so many of the supporting characters storylines are such cliches.
Apples to oranges. I wouldn’t recommend either show to a watcher of the other.
Elementary is sadly really CBS-ed. I stopped watching in Season 3 but will probably watch the rest when it ends this year. No announcement has been made, but it’s ratings have declined pretty badly and it never was an awards-getter, so my guess is CBS only gave it this season for syndication cash. It would have been a lot better on a different network.
I think it would have been better had they left it where it was on Thursdays. Putting it on late Sunday when the schedule is a mess because of football and without a strong lead-in show, people just aren’t going to stay up after 11 at night on a Sunday.
Definitely but I don’t think CBS cared about it anymore. Sunday is the graveyard, that’s where the broadcasts dump dead shows. That’s why I think it only got this past season to hit 100 eps for better syndication rates; they’ve put it there to burn it off.
The ratings decline started pretty early, Season 2 I think, and by Season 4, it was barely getting a 1. Their original Thursday slot used to be good for 2+ on average.
It would have been better on maybe a cable network or something.
Oh dear. Amanda Abbington, that dark, severe hair is not your friend.
Holy Guacamole! I didn’t even recognize her. That is such an unflattering cut and shade 🙁
Oh, that’s so funny — I think she looks really pretty here and I never liked her with blonde hair — I think it washes her out.
I gotta say, I love that Amanda (like so many British actresses) looks so natural — no botox, or fillers. So different from most American actresses, who, by the time they hit 40, are desperate to look younger.
It must be the xenophobia that keeps them looking so fresh, I guess.
It really isn’t. And the makeup is dreadful too. Gatiss looks good.
Cart before horse: many of us are over Sherlock and over Cumberbatch.
I never watched Sherlock and always found him to be odd. That all changed after I saw Dr. Strange. I am now a fan of his and he is one of the nice surprises I had in this year of continuous disappointments or to be more specific, trump.
@Kaiser “Benedict looked like an undertaker…” made me laugh out loud! Thanks for a good chuckle!
it takes way too long in between seasons and specials. I lost interest so very long ago.
I think we’re all over Sherlock, aren’t we? It should have stuck to one or maybe two seasons and let itself go down as a classic. Instead, we got the embarrassment of season three’s fan service and they’ll continue to flog it until the cringe is the size of Mount Everest.
Yes I’m pretty much over it as well. And it’s due to the writing more than the stars at this point. Steven Moffat isn’t a strong writer in my opinion. His stories, especially with Dr. Who, tend to get a little incoherent (not quite sure that’s the right word) during the program before the ending.
Definitely over it.
Yeah, Season 3 it started going downhill due to Moffett’s ego-normous writing and the Christmas special just wasn’t. I’m definitely over it by now.
One visit to Tumblr will confirm that no, “we” are definitely not all over Sherlock. This show still has millions of rabid fans.
There were nods/winks to the audience/fans in S3, but I think they’re writing the story they always intended to write. It’s incredibly layered and mapped out. Each season calls back and makes a little more sense of the previous one.
To me, they started going “darker” way too soon. As in – after the first 2 seasons, they immediately started talking about “testing” relationships and changing this and that, and going into darker places. I can see the need for that in a traditional show, which has 20-25 episodes and runs 6-9 months a year. But in a show that airs 3 episodes every 2 or so years, by episode 7, they have barely established a solid relationship, and then they immediately turned around and started messing with it. I think I could have easily enjoyed at least 1 or 2 more seasons of “same old”, same old being just good solid re-writes of the original stories, fun, intense, but with enough comic relief. They messed with a winning formula too soon, IMO, before anyone else was ready to move on.
My feelings exactly. They messed with it too soon. We only had 6 episodes for John and Sherlock to be established, then they threw in Mary and all the bigger-louder-more-upsetting stuff. I might watch season 4, but I might wait and think it over. Depends on what else I’ve got going on.
The constant baiting and teasing from Moftiss are pretty tiring to me, and they overwork everything so badly, all their characters and plot elements. Clearly this is the biggest thing in their lives and they think it is for us, too, but, y’know, it just isn’t.
He’s pretty much only good as Sherlock. I was annoyed when he took time off to voice the dragon for the Hobbit. Nothing he’s done outside of Sherlock adds anything to the characters he’s playing. His Kahn was weak and his Dr Strange was obnoxious and had one of the worst American accents I’ve ever heard. Your CGI cape out-acted you, Man. Just do the one thing you’re good at. That’s your legacy. Geez
My husband wanted to see Dr. Strange, I didn’t. I was like that weird looking dude in the lead, more popcorn please. But…..he was so annoying in the beginning that I liked disliking him. By the end of the movie I was surprised how much I liked it and him, although Tilda was such a badass, I liked her more! On a different genre…..if you want to hear a bad accent, watch the Walking Dead’s Maggie. The actress portraying her is US born, UK raised and she is supposed to be from Atlanta on the show and Southern accent is gag worthy. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) is British, tried the Southern accent for a bit, realized it sucked and now speaks better English than all of us….accent free!
If I was him, I would probably be over it too-all the batshit crazy stans and they way Moffat caters to them.
It’s a bummer because I still really love season one and the quality just went straight downhill after that. The Christmas episode is best not spoken of.
I’m going to watch the new series and hope they’ve gotten serious about the writing and that they haven’t Cousin Oliver’d themselves into a corner with bringing a baby into the whole thing. Also, if anything happens to Molly, Imma cut someone.
LOL. Eye of the beholder, I guess, because the way the stans tell it, he’s not catering to them at all. They claim all he does is bait them with Johnlock, when he’s been adamant that he’s not. Frankly, I don’t get all the baiting. I see the same episodes and I don’t see any romance going on between the men. John especially has been a hetero-hound dog.
I enjoyed all the episodes. Some more than others, but it’s way better than Elementary. I just couldn’t get through that. It’s too CBS for my tastes.
It jumped ship after the 2nd series, mostly due to the ego of Moffat and fan fiction plots from the internet.
Cumberbatch was always going to dump this as soon as better things came along. He’s been hinting at it since its success opened doors for him. He like Hiddles has his eye on A list Hollywood fame. Bendys ego has gotten too big for the show..
I am over it as the last season was rubbish. They will have to really do this one well for me to stick with it.
I think it’s inevitable that the audience would lose some interest, since the series goes years without shows. They may have thought that the fans of the show will like anything they put out there—-hence “Abominable Bride.” Short version of comment: I’ll watch it, but The Thrill Is Gone.
And what is up with his hair?! I can’t recall seeing his hair parted and flattened down like that. It looks strange on him. Is he even denying his own natural hair now? Maybe it’s for a movie.
Everyone was saying this after Series 3, but the Christmas special (regardless of my feelings on it) had the 2nd highest ratings of the whole run of the show.
There’s often a disconnect between small gossip/fan circles and the majority of the casual audience. It goes both ways too, like how everyone on social media loved Hannibal and it was such a hit but truthfully very few people were watching it compared to other shows. NBC gave it another chance because of the social media activity and the ratings ended up even worse.
–hair is for a movie although i am thinking this is probably the more rushed version lol
–early reviews of s4 ep 1 are really good from places that disliked the special. return to form-type stuff, this season is probably more like s1/s2 if i had to guess going by what’s being said
@J, i just remembered that he has started filming The Current War, about Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Maybe that’s Edison’s hairdo!
That’s funny, because I’m over Benedict!
If Ben is ready to jump the Sherlock ship, I won’t miss it. I’ve enjoyed most of the episodes and like the chemistry between Ben and Martin Freeman. But I can see Ben wanting to move on to other projects. I won’t go to the Marvel movie but I’ve been watching The Hollow Crown and think he’s wonderful as Richard III.
I think there are more terrific performances to come from Ben, just not as Sherlock.
Didn’t Martin Freeman and Amanda Abbington split up? I’ve wondered what that was about…
I heard that too, and look at those pictures…she has a trauma hairdo and they’re not even looking at each other in any of the photos.
Has she had something done to her face or is it just the dreadful hairdo and black eye makeup? Her face looks really odd and lopsided. I saw her in Letters Live recently and she looked nothing like that.
Honestly she looks like she’s had a stroke or something.
That’s the rumour, but it was never confirmed. I bumped into Amanda at a party about a month ago – she was solo, but in very good spirits.
Well they’ve both been out and about – separately – for many months now. This is the first event I’ve seen both of them at and the interaction looks purely professional. No warmth at all.
Season 3 bummed me out in its mediocrity, but seasons 1 and 2 are still some of the best television I’ve ever seen and I remain a fan of the show and of Benedict. For season 4 I have low expectations and high hopes.
Oh Mark Gatiss in the pic! I have a huge crush on him..and he plays Mycroft brilliantly…
Well, word on the street is that Bendy and Martin fell out a while back, plus Martin and Amanda Abbington have split up because he was having an affair.
Its a shame, its the only thing I consider him to have been really good in.
I’m going to be a lone voice here and say I still love it, especially the Easter egg nods to the I original stories. Even series 3. I don’t really see the fan service that gets mentioned a lot and I don’t think the writers are the type to go in for that so much. Moffat has a huge ego and I don’t think he’d be swayed to tell a different story to the one he wanted because of fans on the internet.
I might be biased – my obsession for all things Holmesian started age 10 and hasn’t let up since, but my family and I will be watching as many as are made.
(On a completely unrelated note, when did Martin Freeman get hot?!)
I went through an intense crush phase on Martin Freeman after TAB – I think it was his awkward questioning of whether Sherlock was still a virgin.
So very very sad if he and Amanda broke up.
@Beluga I think it happened around the time he was filming Whiskey Tango Foztrot. .at least, that’s when I noticed!
Started to watch Sherlock since everyone seems to think it is so great…I could not finish the first season. There are barely any episodes they are just overlong and boring and nothing special. It is just a typical crime drama with a main charcater that everyone need to tell is special and great what he does constantly instead of making it more organic like House that is actulaly likable despite being a similar rude personality.
I don’t think it takes 5 monthes to make 3 or 4 episodes of Sherlock.
The US usually gets TV months earlier than Europr do get over the few hours guys :’)
Been over it. Not a fan of Freeman and the s3 writing sucked. Love Elementary, though.