Looking Ahead to Unforgotten Season 4
Unforgotten fans, don’t fret: the hit mystery series will return for a fourth season. Stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar will be back as the crime solving duo DCI Cassie Stuart and DI Sunny Khan, with writer/executive producer Chris Lang and director Andy Wilson back at the helm.
“I am so delighted to have been asked to make a fourth series of Unforgotten,” Lang stated in the press release. “The reaction to series 3 was better than I could ever have expected (with more people watching the last episode than any other in all three series) and I cannot wait to discover what lies ahead for Cassie and Sunny, and to create a whole new cast of characters for them to grapple with.”
While Season 3 (and 2 and 1) was a great success, part of Lang getting on board with another season meant pulling together the same team that has brought Unforgotten to life since the beginning.
“If I can get the team together,
Season 3 centered on the cold case murder of a teenage girl on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium, after her bones were dug up and discovered near a busy highway. DCI Cassie Stuart, DI Sunny Khan and their team trace a group of friends who’d been renting a holiday getaway with their families mere miles from the location that Hayley Reid was last seen. All four of the men are hiding secrets, but did they kill Hayley?
The third season welcomed guest stars Kevin McNally, James Fleet, Neil Morrissey and familiar MASTERPIECE face Alex Jennings (Victoria, Churchill’s Secret), who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award by the British Academy Television Awards (BAFTA) for his Unforgotten performance. Previous seasons have featured star talents such as Tom Courtenay, who won the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA in 2016 for his performance on the show, Trevor Eve, Ruth Sheen, Mark Bonnar, Wendy Craig and Lorraine Ashbourne.
So far, very few details have been released about Unforgotten Season 4. No plot details have been revealed just yet, but Chris Lang did give a teaser to the MASTERPIECE Studio podcast.
“[Season 4] will be about our relationship with the police,” Lang said. “I think I if I had to describe it, I’d say it’s both a love letter and a j’accuses, which again reflects that slightly conflicted relationship that I think a lot of us have with the police. I hope it’s primarily a love letter. So that’s that’s what it’s about. And again of course tracks the lives of four people, two men, two women. And follows Sunny and Cassie on their journey as well.”
For the first time ever, even the producers have requested to avoid spoilers of who the killer is during production. According to Radio Times, at the BFI and Radio Times Television Festival in April, executive producer Laura Mackie said, “We have made an interesting decision in series 4. In the past, [executive producer] Sally Haynes and I have always known who’s done it. This time we’ve decided with Chris that we don’t want to know. …We came in a few weeks ago and Sally and I were looking and ask each other who we thought could be the culprit and we literally didn’t know.”
Despite the lack of story details about the new season just yet, it’s safe to say that Chris Lang will continue to steer away from classic detective tropes so often seen on screen. It’s always been what he stayed away from when it came to writing the show, and what he likes best about Cassie and Sunny.
“You know, all of us as individuals are extraordinary in the way that we plot our path through life. That for me is always enough. I didn’t feel they needed any kind of super intuitive powers, or a classic British car, or a drinking problem, or a drug problem or a mental health problem. … It felt to me like the job was extraordinary enough, and you didn’t have to make the people who inhabited that world, you didn’t have to make them extraordinary,” Lang told the MASTERPIECE Studio podcast.
Learn more about the cast and past seasons of Unforgotten:
As Seen In: The Cast of Unforgotten, Seasons 1 & 2
Behind The Scenes: On Set with Sanjeev Bhaskar
