Everything To Remember About 'Unforgotten' Ahead of Season 4

Unforgotten's schedule has been one filled with long gaps of waiting between seasons. Season 1 was initially broadcast in the U.K. in the fall of 2015; a second season didn't follow until nearly 18 months later in early 2017. Season 3 also took its time in arriving in the summer of 2018. U.S. fans have had less of a wait, as PBS' decision to pick the show up in 2018 meant fans got Seasons 1 and 2 back to back, with Season 3 already ready to go for the following spring. But even fans used to the long gaps were unprepared for the nearly three-year wait until Season 4. With DCI Cassie Stuart and her partner DI Sunny Khan having been away from the small screen for so long, let's run down where the show's been.

The series initially started with forming a new department, both pitched and headed up by Stuart. Its mission: cold case files, searching for the killers of long-dead murder victims, and trying to find justice for the missing. Their first case was skeletal remains found in the rubble of a demolished basement of a house standing for centuries (luckily the body, a man named Jimmy Sullivan, was only from the 1970s). That season introduced fans to the show's format: Four suspects, seemingly unconnected, living lives far away from those at the time of the crime, whose pasts are now coming back to haunt them.

But even though the suspects who were innocent of the crime had their lives turned upside down on Stuart's quest for justice, the ends always seemed to justify the means. At least until Season 2, when the victim, David Walker, turned out to be a pedophile and sex trafficker, and the suspects all adults whose childhoods were ripped away by men like him. Though Stuart solved the case, a complex web of victims killing each other's perpetrators; she was swayed by one of the suspects: Colin, a barrister, who argued that justice had already been served.