'Grantchester' Season 4 Trailer Introduces Sidney Chambers' Replacement

Back in 2017, ITV's beloved mystery series Grantchester hit what has become a common snag for popular shows around the Season 3 mark. Success had come calling and star James Norton wanted to answer it. The same thing happened on Downton Abbey with Dan Stevens a few years back, and more recently with Essie Davis on Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries down under in Australia. The former decided to survive without Stevens' popular character Matthew Crowley and bumped him off in the Season 3 finale. The latter saw Davis as too central to the show's concept to do this and worked with the actress to move to a big screen serial format that allowed her to take other work, while simultaneously starting a TV replacement spinoff series, Ms Fisher's MODern Mysteries, with a new star.

Grantchester, by rights, should have been in the Miss Fisher situation, as Norton's character Sidney Chambers, is the leading man in the novels the show is based on. (Each book uses the familiar Harry Potter titling convention, Sidney Chambers and the...) But ITV got lucky in their decision to name the show after the town of Grantchester where Sidney is based, instead of after the character himself. This gave the production room to consider their program more of an ensemble piece. With Norton's character already in a "will he or won't he?" relationship with the church, the production could decide he finally won't, and bring in a new vicar to the parish.

That seems like exactly what will happen. Check out the trailer for Season 4, arriving this July on PBS: