Is ‘Whitstable Pearl' returning for season 4? Everything we know so far
Fans can't get enough of Whitstable Pearl , the British crime drama that's got everyone hooked on its seaside mysteries and charming characters. Picture this: Whitstable's windswept beaches, cozy pubs, and Pearl Nolan digging into the town's secrets. Season 3 left viewers craving more, but is a fourth season coming? Here's the rundown on everything known so far. Has Whitstable Pearl Season 4 Been Confirmed?
Here's the deal: as of July 18, 2025, no official announcement has confirmed Whitstable Pearl Season 4. Acorn TV and Buccaneer Media, the show's producers, haven't dropped any news about a renewal. Online chatter, especially on Reddit, shows fans speculating and hoping, but nothing's set in stone. No premiere date, no production hints—zip.
Still, there's reason to stay optimistic. Acorn TV jumped on renewing Season 3 before Season 2 even aired, which shows they're big on the series. The fanbase is vocal, loving the cast and that laid-back coastal charm. Julie Wassmer's books offer plenty of material to mine, so a fourth season feels like it could happen. For now, though, it's a waiting game. Keep an ear out for updates from Acorn TV. What to Expect in Whitstable Pearl Season 4?
No confirmation means no solid details, but imagining what a fourth season might look like is half the fun. Based on the show's track record and fan buzz, here are some possibilities. Fresh Coastal Crimes
Every season delivers new mysteries, blending quirky locals with proper suspense. Season 3 had cases like a dodgy psychic and a decades-old cold case. A fourth season would likely serve up more of that—think a shady deal at the harbor or a murder tied to a Whitstable festival. Writers like Mike Walden mix book-inspired plots with original stories, so there'd be no shortage of clever twists. Pearl and Mike: Romance or Tease?
The slow-burn chemistry between Pearl and Mike keeps fans glued. Season 3 dropped hints of something deeper, but Pearl's with Tom, and Mike's got his own baggage. Would a new season finally spark something romantic, or keep stringing viewers along? The tension's half the fun, but a little progress wouldn't hurt. The Cast That Shines
If Season 4 gets the go-ahead, expect the core crew back: Kerry Godliman as Pearl Nolan, the heart of every investigation.
Howard Charles as Mike McGuire, all brooding intensity.
Frances Barber as Dolly Nolan, tossing out one-liners and stealing scenes.
Robert Webb as Tom Grant, the chill boyfriend vibe.
Isobelle Molloy and Rohan Nedd as Ruby and Charlie, keeping things lively.
Sophia Del Pizzo as DS Nikki Martel, who fans are begging to see more of.
New guest stars could pop up for each case, and maybe some familiar faces like Kat (Emily Head) would return. Whitstable's Picture-Perfect Backdrop
Whitstable's beaches, harbor, and pubs are practically characters themselves. Filming happens in real Kent spots—think Whitstable Yacht Club or The Old Neptune—plus nearby towns like Margate and Dover. A new season would likely lean into that coastal magic, maybe tossing in a fresh location for variety. Dolly Running the Show
Dolly Nolan, played by Frances Barber, is a total standout. Season 3 let her play detective when Pearl was swamped, and fans on social media can't stop raving about her. A fourth season better give Dolly more chances to snoop and sling zingers—she's the secret sauce.
Ahmedabad Plane Crash
Aman Shukla is a post-graduate in mass communication . A media enthusiast who has a strong hold on communication ,content writing and copy writing. Aman is currently working as journalist at BusinessUpturn.com
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Zombieland Zombieland made it possible to where we got two outstanding zombie comedies in the 2000s. This clever riff on the undead apocalypse carved itself into the comedy annals with the way it meshes a smart-aleck approach to horror rules with the fractured formation an endearing found family. It's also just funny as heck, highlighted by a shotgun-blast cameo by Bill Murray whose untimely demise is one of the great shock laughs of the century. Murray might regret his time making Garfield, but there will never be any regretting the experience of taking in Zombieland. 41. Hail, Caesar! With all due respect to the hysteric pointlessness of Burn After Reading, Hail, Caesar! is the great Coen Brothers comedy of the century. The Coens cook up a laugh riot of a Golden Age Hollywood spoof, complete with Channing Tatum's second-funniest century moment (his scream-funny "No Dames" musical number) and Alden Ehrenreich's should'a-been-star-making turn as affable Western lead Hobie Doyle. 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Zoolander Ben Stiller is one of the Mount Rushmore figures of 2000s comedy, and Derek Zoolander is one of its cherished morons. As much as you'd like to forget the abysmal 2016 sequel, the original Zoolander is a pop culture touchstone and a relentlessly funny send-up of the modeling industry and the gaudy early 2000s pop aesthetics that backed it. Stiller and Owen Wilson have always had impressive chemistry with each other, perfectly paired as two bozo models forced to get along in the face of evil. As great as they are, Zoolander is quietly one of Will Ferrell's triumphs as Mugatu, a rapacious villain capable of dastardly hubris and genuine confusion as to how stupid those around him really are. The "house of ants" scene with Zoolander even flashes a brief glimmer of Mugatu sympathy for just how dumb-as-a-rock the former really is, a strong credit to the range Ferrell has when he's fully attuned to his character. 24. 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This level of satire typically gets enshrined in far higher halls than a best comedies list, so here's hoping more and more people find out what this movie is about and how brilliant it is in executing its most piercing satires. Tara Reid and Parker Posey both deliver awards-worthy performances that underscore just the high difficulty of making comedy look effortless. If there is any justice, DuJour would mean far, far more than friendship, teamwork, crash positions and seatbelts. 22. The Hangover The Hangover is an enigma at this point. Arguably the most popular comedy of the last 25 years, The Hangover set an impossible bar for future comedies to reach. It set off the beginning of the end to the blockbuster studio comedy, as studios tried and failed to capture the next Hangover-sized phenomenon. The sequels couldn't come close to reaching the alchemy of what came before them. Some of the film has aged poorly, too. However, despite all of that, it's still a vital entry on this list. The movie cemented Bradley Cooper as a movie star, made alt-comedy darling Zach Galifianakis a household name, turned Ed Helms into Steve Carell's Office heir and had people guffawing about babies in sunglasses, sedated tigers, satchel with damaged Skittles and the most uproarious end-credit slideshow of revelatory photos in the history of cinema. Practically everyone you knew saw The Hangover, and most people you know still quote it with regularity to this day. The way we consume humor is primarily to blame for the death of the studio comedy, but The Hangover rode in like four hungover horsemen of the hilarity apocalypse. The bar got set impossibly high, and the sequels couldn't deliver the same consistency. We'll always have Vegas, at least. 21. Bottoms There is one film from the 2020s on this list, and that's Emma Seligman's sublime high school comedy Bottoms. Seligman established herself as a comedic talent to watch with Shiva Baby, and blessed be the comedy gods that she leveled up in budget and absurdism with Bottoms. The film feels like the heir apparent to Not Another Teen Movie in all the best ways, and it gave us Marshawn Lynch: Comedy Icon to go along with career-best turns for Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri. Bottoms is the only Gen Z-coded film on this list, and it's inarguably one of the most important comedies of the last decade. Seligman showed studios a path forward for making comedies for a new generation. There is a way to meet evolving social norms without sacrificing laugh-a-minute comedy. The world needs more movies like Bottoms in it, original comedic concepts with funny people doing stupid things for kicks. 20. Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby Adam McKay and Will Ferrell took the success of Anchorman and parlayed it into this blistering Bush-era satire of big, booming America with Talladega Nights. Ferrell's Ricky Bobby is beyond iconic by now, as this film brought people to the theater in droves to take in the insanity of NASCAR against the backdrop of engine-revving American values. It's sharp as a tack in the way it weaves in grander themes about the country at that time into a nearly flawless comedic saga, making the most of its unreal ensemble and jam-packed-with-jokes script. The Bobby family dinner table prayer scene remains an otherworldly comedic achievement in writing and performance. Sure, it's not quite Anchorman, but it didn't have to be. Talladega Nights is still a towering work for superstars in their prime. 19. Shrek Shrek is one of the few animated films on our list, but it's wholly deserving of a very high spot. The film revolutionized what animated movies could be, breaking free from the tidy hilarity of Disney for something grungier, more adept for irreverence and body humor to get its funny points across. Shrek is a perfect send-up of the Disney fairy-tale industrial complex as it is just an absolute banger of a fairy-tale comedy. An ogre farts in a pond and kills fish, a donkey wants to make waffles, a princess burps and beats the everlasting heck out of Robin Hood, a sniveling lord stands about four feet high on a good day. Shrek is deeply unserious, but it's also an Oscar winner. Animation wasn't the same after Shrek, as the format opened itself up to more straightforward comedies for kids. 18. Borat Sacha Baron Cohen took his Kazakhstan-loving television personality Borat to America at the peak of the Bush years, and the world of comedy was never the same. Cohen's gleeful disguise revealed a stark underbelly to the country his Borat traversed, and we didn't always get such a great snapshot of our fellow citizens as a result. However, what we did get is a film so painfully funny that it hurt to laugh as much as it hurt to watch. You can debate the ethics of Cohen's methods to get footage if you wish, but you can't deny his results. Borat is an all-timer. 17. Meet the Parents & Meet the Fockers Greg Focker meeting his future in-laws gave the world one of the most relatable comedies of all time, and a few years later, meeting Focker's parents kept the laughs going at an unreal clip. Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers are perfect examples of how you can find generational hilarity in the most simple of concepts, like meeting an ornery father in Robert De Niro who is very suspicious if you're good enough for his daughter. The dynamics are prickly, and the laughs are plentiful. We've all been there in one way or another, which makes it all even funnier. 16. The Foot Fist Way Concord, North Carolina, gave us one of the funniest films of the last 25 years in The Foot Fist Way and a bona fide comedy legend in the process in Danny McBride. The Foot Fist Way is a spectacular example of how having just enough of a budget is more than enough for a masterpiece if you have trillions of megawatts in hilarity on hand, too. McBride's Fred Simmons, the King of the Demo, strikes an uncanny balance between demented weirdo and endearing underdog. McBride's alpha-dog energy combines with Southern sass and just a tinge of rapscallionism to make Simmons play like a happy medium between Peter LaFleur and Travis Bickle. McBride and regular directing collaborator Jody Hill set that balance against a film that's impressively immensely lovable and a little dangerous. 15. Tropic Thunder Ben Stiller's showbiz spoof Tropic Thunder took a sucker-punch inwardly to the ego of actors, the hubris of directors and the shamelessness of the corporate class. The concept is so rich, putting a bunch of pampered actors into the "jungle of war" only to have them actually face violence and combat that unmoors their collective sense of being into total chaos. There is so much to love, from the fake trailers that kick the film off to the way it hops and skips between Hollywood and the hellacious conditions of the Golden Triangle. However, the film lives and dies on Robert Downey Jr., and his Kirk Lazarus remains one of the all-time comedic performances. He literally got nominated for an Oscar in a movie with a fake trailer for The Fatties: Fart 2. Now that's what you call acting. 14. Hot Rod The Lonely Island created Hot Rod in the dead-heat of a summer between SNL seasons, only to see it unceremoniously dumped on the film calendar between The Simpsons Movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, Stardust, Rush Hour 3 and Superbad. It never even stood a chance against the comedies it went up against. However, the five of us who saw it in theaters knew what a special movie it really was. All these years later, Andy Samberg is no longer just the "Lazy Sunday" guy, and Hot Rod is a real-deal cult classic boasting some of the most promising comedic talents of that era in front of and behind the camera. It's one of the great stupid-smart comedies of its time and a mission statement for The Lonely Island's comedy, which is pretty... cool beans to us. Cool, cool, cool, cool beans. 13. Bridesmaids Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo changed the game with their Bridesmaids script, guided by Paul Feig's capable direction and one of the funniest performances of all time from Melissa McCarthy. Like Downey Jr., she earned Oscar attention in Best Supporting Actress for her scene-stealing turn, replacing Gilmore Girls as the primary project McCarthy will be known for throughout the rest of her career. Bridesmaids is vital for how it reshuffled the deck for what the Apatow-era comedy could be, moving it past the bros and showing that women could obviously also lean into physical and bodily humor that underscored a deeper story about tested friendships. The bridal dress try-on scene will live eternal. You can't talk about the best comedies of the century without Bridesmaids listed high. 12. Idiocracy Mike Judge remains one of cinema's most unassuming prophets, as his scorching satire Idiocracy feels closer and closer to reality as any of us would like to admit. Its future depicts a confederacy of dunces that devolved into watering plants with energy drinks, going to the movies in record number to laugh at an image of a man's buttocks and electing a professional wrestler to be president. As you can see, we're not that far off from Judge's vision of a tomorrow full of yesterdays. The menace of the now mirroring the lunacy of the fictional isn't Judge's fault, as his pristine trilogy of this, Office Space and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America create a deliriously funny triptych for the world as it was (Beavis), the world as it always is (Office) and the world as it may one day be (Idiocracy). It's the comedic equivalent of a hat trick, as Idiocracy is the arm-fart Ghost of Christmas Future warning us to wise up. 11. The Jackass series Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of painful pranksters have spent the last 25 years or so torturing themselves for our entertainment, and we can't thank them enough for it. The Jackass quadrilogy stands as some of our finest examples of physical comedy by default because nobody puts themselves on the line for laughs like these guys. In the Jackass world, a gator can bite your nipple, and you'd call it light work. A bull can ram you into the next zip code, and you're hopping right back in the pin for more. You can get shot out of a canon and plastered with paintball bullets as a rite of passage for all the Jackasses before you. As lightheaded as you get watching these films for how incredibly funny they are, you're also heartened by their brazen stupidity. If you're going to be dumb, you've got to be tough, after all. This gang's stiff upper lip when the pain sets in keeps us all believing in the lunatic human spirit. 10. Shaun the Sheep Movie Every now and again, you have to go with your gut. My gut tells me time after time that Shaun the Sheep Movie is the closest we've gotten to a modern Buster Keaton silent comedy. Shaun and his bleating pals making a run for the city with Bitzer the sheep dog on their tail finds pockets of comedy unheard of in modern entertainment. The way it can send you into another dimension from laughing so hard without any words is transformative. Watching a group of sheep dressed in people clothes try to navigate a meal at a restaurant gives you some of the finest silent comedy we've ever gotten. Like, c'mon, you try not cackling at the sight of a sheep eating a menu because they're confused how people food works. Shaun the Sheep Movie really is Aardman's cinematic masterpiece, and there is no world where you don't laugh at least a couple of times for where this film takes you. It's real comedy in its purest form. 9. Freddy Got Fingered Tom Green burned millions of dollars of studio money to destroy and rebuild the comedy template with Freddy Got Fingered, crafting a head rush of offensiveness refracted from Green's view of "what the people wanted" from their funny trips to the movies. Watching Green act in a traditional studio comedy like Road Trip makes Freddy Got Fingered even funnier, if only because Green knew what was expected of him and completely flipped it on its head into a Godardian nightmare of unforgiving subversion and hands-flailing, hair on fire anarchy. The alt-comedy we love now isn't possible without Green's groundbreaking innovations, as he broke the boundaries with a sledgehammer of what comedy even means in a movie to unsettle us to a new level of laughter. You have to accept Freddy Got Fingered on its own terms, and you have to suspend your disbelief a bit for just how far Green is willing to push the parameters of taste into the grotesque and deplorable. The legendary Roger Ebert wrote in his infamous zero-star review that "the day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." Ebert was right about the first part, as Freddy Got Fingered recently popped up on the Criterion streaming service. He was wrong about the latter because this movie was and always will be a hoot. It's a comedic milestone in bad taste and reconfigured norms. You will rush to your nearest shower after you're done watching it, but you will also appreciate that the revolution arguably started with Freddy. 8. Knocked Up Knocked Up works out of a pretty simple premise: what if a promising young woman's one-night stand with a man-child left them as parents-to-be? Judd Apatow followed The 40-Year-Old Virgin with a suffocatingly funny and staggeringly human look into what it really means to commit to a cause grander than yourself in parenthood. We watched Seth Rogen learn to put his toys away and learn to embrace fatherhood came just a couple of months before the script he co-wrote with his best friend when they were teenagers, Superbad, blew up the zeitgeist. Rogen's 2007 turned him into a star, and his and Katherine Heigl's prickly-but-caring chemistry anchors the film in a sense of refreshing unease. You really don't know for most of the movie how this is all going to go, and that only heightens the film's best comedic beats. You can't help but root for them, and you're left laughing heartily waiting for answers. This will always be Apatow's best film as a director, a modern masterpiece about growing up. 7. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Walk Hard didn't kill the music biopic, but it did make it downright impossible to run from its shadow. John C. Reilly led this breathtaking spoof of the music biopic a couple of years after Walk the Line and Ray, even if Walk Hard took its time to build an audience in the time after its tepid release. At the time, only a handful showed up for the life and times of fictional musician Dewey Cox. Those who latched on found some of the sharpest satire of the century so far, as the tiresome mechanics of how music biopics function got playfully pantsed under the bright lights. A world with Walk Hard challenges any music biopic to push past the well-worn tropes that Cox stomped into fine dust. As far as parodies go, Walk Hard is a Mount Rushmore achievement. All these years later, Cox walks harder than ever. 6. A Mighty Wind Fred Willard gets a couple of minutes in Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind to rattle off the kind of impromptu routine that most comedic actors can only dream of crafting. Willard's spiky-haired doofus manager of a theme park-playing folk group gleefully talks about his career to whoever will listen and throws out his catchphrase, "Hey wha'happened?" at the drop of a hat. It's hard to catch every word of Willard's monologue because the laughter it invokes leaves you downright dizzy and too wheezy-laughed to catch everything. It is the pinnacle of what comedy can give its audience, and it's only one part of Guest's masterful mockumentary about a gaggle of folk groups reuniting for a memorial concert. Willard represents the film's militant silliness, while Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, two of Guest's regular players, represent the sweeter side, where a kiss at the end of the rainbow is more precious than a part of gold. Their climactic duo stops the entire movie in quiet awe. It's a showstopper from the heart that only underscores how impressive it is the movie that surrounds it is just so, so outrageously funny. 5. 21 Jump Street & 22 Jump Street The greatest comedic sight gag in cinema history revolves around Channing Tatum and a gong. After accidentally getting zonked on an illegal drug, Tatum and Jonah Hill go on the trip of a lifetime while working undercover as high school students in 21 Jump Street. Tatum's magical mystery tour culminates in him crashing a high school band practice and jumping headfirst into a gong. It's the funniest thing any human has ever done, as scientists have proven after extensive research (don't Google that). Tatum's emergence as a generational comedic talent is best exemplified by his fearless leap into the center of the gong, as Phil Lord and Chris Miller knew exactly how to tap into the radiant funny bone he'd largely hidden up to 21 Jump Street. Lord and Miller's astonishing Jump Street films are the best one-two punches of the century so far in comedy, the original showing how the duo could make magic out of quite literally any material and the sequel a supremely impressive send-up of the comedy sequels in general. These films are comedic tidal waves, crashing with the sheer force of genre masters at the height of their powers. 4. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy What else is there to say about Anchorman? Adam McKay and Will Ferrell's masterpiece is one of the objective all-time great comedies, one that so many of us have seen so many times that we can quote it in its entirety whenever we're asked. It's Ferrell's finest hour as a comedic performer, as Ron Burgundy is the perfect encapsulation of why he's so funny and why he's so particularly dangerous with the right material. The film finds compelling through lines about gender politics and how they interact with each other in circles of achievement, and it also features a man saying he loves a lamp and ate a big, red candle. Anchorman is basically why we love comedic movies. 3. Hot Fuzz Edgar Wright may never make another movie as good as Hot Fuzz, nor should he have to. Hot Fuzz is a perfect movie, so in love with its action-comedy influences and yet so compelled to usurp them with flawless examples of both intertwined as poetry in motion. We get Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in shoot-em-up mode in a suspicious village where murder pops up as surprisingly as a cloud on a sunny day, and Wright finds an unprecedented balance between the laugh-until-you-hurt humor and the wince-because-that-hurt action-gore. Sometimes, it's really hard to explain fully why a film is perfect in writing, but when you know, you know. Hot Fuzz floors it with genuine joy. It's one of my favorite movies... ever, as are the top two films you're about to see. We're almost there, folks. 2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall Jason Segel getting dumped by Kristen Bell and then revealing his unclothed body to the entire world through the movie camera is true, cringe-worthy bravery. Of course, Segel isn't actually getting dumped, but you'd almost believe he was with how painfully funny it is to watch him grieve the romance that was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The greatest romantic comedy of the century so far, Forgetting Sarah Marshall never hits a false note. Every joke lands, every actor finds their place in the material, every story beat feels earned and real. Segel anchors the entire film in his sad-sack empathy, delivering career-best work that blends his impressive comedic timing with his character's mopey messiness. Breakups suck, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall still finds incredible catharsis in the act of finally letting go, even if it requires you to go all the way to Hawaii to run into your ex and their new squeeze. Now, if we could only get a Broadway run of Segel's Dracula puppet musical, our lives really would be complete... maybe. 1. Superbad Superbad is a right-of-passage movie for teens of a certain age. If you were, say, about to turn 15 in 2007, and your uncle bought your ticket to one of an opening-weekend showing, your life was about to change forever. In case you couldn't guess... that kid was me. Superbad was formative for my understanding of what comedies could be, as it hit at the exact right time for somebody my age to appreciate its sophomoric humor and its profound revelations about friendship and puppy-love romance. You're supposed to be a little too young for this movie when you watch it for the first time, as Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing this movie when they were teenagers. For all the characters' harrowing side quests and buffoonish missteps, Seth and Evan's mission to score booze for a house party to impress their crushes is universally understood by its target audience. We've all been there in one way or another. It's the best comedy of the century because, quite literally, we've all been stupid high schoolers on the cusp of massive changes in our life, just trying to have a good time without our parents knowing what we're doing. It's one of the most relatable comedies ever, and it's undoubtedly the funniest movie on this list, too. Rogen and Goldberg took the coming-of-age comedy and spun it on its head, and we're all the better for it. Long live McLovin!
