Yahoo News More Sherlock might actually be impossible
Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss doesn't expect a fifth series to happen any time soon. If it ever happens at all.
It's obviously more of a struggle to make Sherlock each and every series, since Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are bona fide Marvel superstars with plenty of movies lined up.
The fact that they even returned at all for three episodes ending with 'The Final Problem' in January is a minor miracle - one which Gatiss doesn't think will be easy to repeat.
"I honestly don't know if there will be any more. It's incredibly difficult to get Benedict and Martin's diaries to align," The Sun quotes Gatiss as saying.
"And obviously we left it in a very happy place… if that's the end I'd be very happy where we left it."
So murky is the future of Sherlock that producers even tried to guarantee that the fourth series' final shooting day included Benedict and Martin working together (potentially for the last time), but that didn't quite go to plan.
"We did actually try and contrive it so the very last shot was Benedict and Martin running out of the building," he remembered.
"Then we realised that we had to do one last shot the next day of Martin falling over - so that's how it ended. As usual these things end with a whimper."
The good news is that if Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman do ever free up time for more Sherlock, Mark Gatiss and co-writer Steven Moffat already have a few story ideas.
"Mark's always wanted to do 'The Red-Headed League' [and] there's 'The Engineer's Thumb', which is a slightly mad story that doesn't have a proper ending," Moffat recently revealed.
"There's an element of 'The Greek Interpreter' that I think is really exciting, which hasn't been done, because in our version of events Irene Adler is still out there. There's always that.
"Now we know she and Sherlock actually still text each other. What would happen if they ever met again? There are those things we can do, but we simply have no idea whether we'll be doing them or not."
Any new episodes would likely be met with rapturous enthusiasm from fans, since Sherlock recently toppled even Doctor Who to be named the world's favourite BBC character.
At the very least, we can bank on seeing Benedict Cumberbatch back on BBC One in the months ahead for a one-off adaptation of Ian McEwan's 1987 novel The Child in Time.
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