Steven Moffat has left the door open to Sherlock returning, but only if he can persuade everyone else involved to come back with him. Speaking during the Half the Picture podcast interview, the co-creator said, “Of course I’d revisit it, yeah,” before adding, “Yeah, if I can persuade everybody else.”
The timing matters because Sherlock has been off TV since 2017, and the idea of a return immediately pulls Martin Freeman back into the conversation. Earlier this year, Freeman told Radio Times that a revival was “not right now,” a line that still hangs over any talk of a new run and makes Moffat’s comments feel less like a reunion announcement than the start of a negotiation.
Moffat did not sound tired of the show. If anything, he sounded protective of it. He said he loved Sherlock, missed it, and thought all of it was excellent and beautifully acted. He also said there were “loads more you could do with Sherlock,” and framed the idea of coming back as a question of age as much as plot, saying the two leads would now be the normal age for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.
That matters because Sherlock was built as a younger version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Moffat said Holmes and Watson are usually treated as about 50 in other versions, while Sherlock was consciously written younger. The series ran for 13 episodes and starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson, with Andrew Scott also appearing as James Moriarty. A revival would not just be a matter of picking up where the last episode left off; it would mean deciding whether those same performances, and the same version of the characters, still have a place nearly 10 years after the original run ended.
The unresolved issue is not whether Moffat is interested. He plainly is. The real barrier is that “everybody else” he mentioned has to be persuaded, and that is where any return lives or dies. With 60 original Sherlock Holmes stories to draw on, Moffat says the material is there. What is not yet there is agreement.
For now, that leaves Sherlock in the familiar position of being both finished and not quite finished. Moffat has said he would go back, Freeman has said not right now, and the gap between those two positions is exactly where the next decision has to be made.
