Across three seasons from 2013 to 2017, TV viewers visited the small Dorsey community to follow Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) solving cases together. The series also starred Jodie Whittaker, Jonathan Bailey, Andrew Buchan, and Arthur Darvill. And if recent shows have taught us anything, it’s that anything can always come back for more. Is that true for Broadchurch?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s so complete, and I think we’ve sort of toyed with ideas or sometimes because I live near the beach where Broadchurch [took place], I’ll be walking along and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe that or this,’” creator Chris Chibnall tells TV Insider.

“I wrote a novel last year called Death at the White Hart. And that was really my dipping my toe back into the waters around Broadchurch. It’s a Broadchurch adjacent novel, set in the same place, different characters,” he says.

Death at the White Hart takes place in Fleetcombe and focuses on the investigation that ensues when the pub’s owner is found dead, tied to a chair in the middle of the road with a stag’s antlers on his head. Detective Nicola Bridge returns to the village where she grew up and partners up with the younger DC Harry Ward.

He explored ideas he had for what could have been next for Hardy and Miller in that novel, which will hopefully be adapted into a TV series. “I think that to scratch that itch, just go, there are other people who are living just down five miles down the coast. Let’s go and see what they think of the world now,” Chibnall says.

As he points out, “The world changes, doesn’t it? As the world changes, sometimes you think about, oh, I wonder what those characters would think about that, or I wonder if something like that had happened. It’s a very different world.” After all, he wrote the first season, and it was filmed, in 2012.

“I think sometimes you capture lightning in a bottle with the show, and I think we did that with Broadchurch, and it’s just really great to let that sit, I think,” Chibnall tells us. “And people still are rediscovering it now, so it’s really lovely.”

As for where Hardy and Miller are now, “I think they’re still bickering on that bench. I really do, where we left them,” he says. However, he also adds, “Hardy, he’ll be retired now. He’ll be out of the police. So maybe he’s a private detective somewhere.”

Were you hoping to see a fourth season of Broadchurch? Let us know in the comments section below.

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