Lucifer fans rejoice, for star Tom Ellis has apparently finalized his deal with Netflix to return to the series for a sixth season. Showrunners Joe Henderson and Ildy Modrovich are also now on board, and other cast members have pre-existing deals as well.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Lucifer has had a long and winding road to get to this point. The show premiered on Fox in 2016 and was cancelled in 2018 after three seasons. But fans didn’t take that sitting down, successfully campaigning to get it picked up by Netflix. This second chance has seen two more seasons released, though many assumed the fifth season would be the last.
The fact that a sixth run is coming is an indication that the show has found a sizeable audience on Netflix, proving that the dedicated fans who argued that it could be a success were right after all. Their work is an inspiration to campaigners like Alita’s Army and #ReleasetheSnyderCut, proving that these sort of things can actually bear fruit.
Ellis himself was rightly thankful for the fan push, too. At the ACE Convention, he said:
“Netflix really wanted to have Lucifer because they really love the show that we already had. So we’ve been careful, we don’t want to change our show too much because that’s the show that people really liked. But there were certain restrictions that we had when we were on network television that meant that maybe we couldn’t do as much as we wanted. So things like my bum, which I was never allowed to show before, and lots of people want to see it, really: there may be some bum shots this season.…There will be multiple bum shots, certainly after a scene we shot the other day.”
While we don’t know exactly what to expect from the new run just yet, the showrunners are adamant that they need to keep trying new things to prevent the series from becoming stale. Here’s what they had to say on how they’re approaching the upcoming season:
“We really try to ping it in a completely different direction. If everybody is speculating on one thing, we just try to think as batshit as we can, as outside of the box as possible, so that people don’t get bored, so we don’t get bored. We do have an idea. It’s an idea that when it came up in the room, we went, ‘Oh god, that’s crazy.’ Then the more we talked about it, the more we went, ‘and brilliant.'”
No word on precisely when we can expect the sixth season to air, but the wheels on Lucifer‘s production are pretty well-oiled by now, so my bet is by the end of the year. Watch this space for more.