'Endeavour' Will End With Season 9

After two years away from American televisions, Endeavour is finally returning next month, debuting a new three-episode season starting Sunday, June 19. The Inspector Morse prequel spinoff has also already been renewed, and Season 9 is currently filming, assuring PBS viewers that there will be more for 2023. Unfortunately, fans will have to brace themselves because those will be the final episodes of the spinoff series. According to ITV and PBS Masterpiece, which co-produced the series, the show is finally reaching its conclusion.

That Endeavour lasted this long was something of a miracle. The original spinoff of Morse, Inspector Lewis, was seen as the heir to the show's legacy and functioned as a reversal of the original series formula. Morse (the late John Thaw) was the prickly intellectual Detective Inspector, and Lewis (Kevin Whately) the plain-spoken copper learning at his feet. Now DI Lewis, still a man of common sense, was saddled with a pretentious intellectual Detective Sargent, Hathaway (Laurence Fox), who needed to be taught some common sense.

Endeavour, set in the early 1960s when Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) first arrives in Oxford as a young policeman, was the same formula as Lewis, with Morse now the pretentious intellectual to Detective Inspector Thursday's (Roger Allam) common sense boss. Because it was similar to Lewis, it was considered a one-off, a TV film created to celebrate Morse's 25th anniversary in 2012. When the film became a massive hit, ITV extended it into a series. At 33 episodes (well, 32 episodes and a feature-length movie), Endeavour has run as long as both preceding shows (Morse and Lewis each hit 33 installments.) Next year's final season will take the show to 36, making it the longest-running of the three series.