Viewership of Sherlock Season 3 Premiere went up to 9.2 million in UK

Popular mystery TV series “Sherlock”, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, is the first show back in the New Year. The fans were already waiting enthusiastically and their eagerness increased after watching first trailer of the season 3.

It's been almost 2 years since we watched Sherlock counterfeit his demise in The Reichenbach Fall, but the long wait ultimately is finished with the excellent “The Empty Hearse” – the first episode of season 3 of Sherlock. As both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are now well-known Hollywood stars with blockbuster films like Star Trek into Darkness and The Hobbit, Sherlock fans are extremely pleased that the TV show has arrived finally, albeit it includes just 3 episodes.

On Wednesday, Sherlock Season 3 U.K. premiere was watched by more than 9.2 million viewers, which is greater than 7.5 million of the 1st season premiere and the 8.8 million of the 2nd season premiere. Overall, the premiere grabbed 33% of the UK viewers.

According to the BBC, Steven Moffat (Sherlock’s co-creator) stated about the so much high viewership of first episode as, "a tribute to the team who work so hard, and with such pride, on the show, and, of course, to the genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It's proof that audiences will show up if you give them what they want -- though we can't throw Benedict off a roof every week."

In the first episode, we saw a number of diverse stories of how Cumberbatch's genius character detective Sherlock Holmes stayed alive after the fall that seemingly killed him in the last moments of Season 2. However, the first episode has still left most of the people speculating how Sherlock had forged his own death. A number of elucidations were presented during the course of the episode, but it looked like that all of them were not true, even the one provided by Sherlock himself. The show has not yet truthfully and resolutely exposed the mystery.

For many viewers, several long explanations about Sherlock’s false death seem not just ludicrously hard to consider, but even include Derren Brown! Some people are satisfied with the first episode, some are not. A number of fans seem quite disappointing with the direction. Not all and sundry are pleased in this world, it is a fact! As Sherlock describes: "Everyone's a critic."

"Sherlock" Season 3 will be released on January 19 in the US.

What do you think about the UK premiere?