Fans Will Have a Longer Wait for Blue Lights Series 3

The cast and crew of Belfast-set police drama Blue Lights had less than a month of filming left on their second series in 2023 when they found out that their show had been renewed for a third and a fourth run.

“We were three or four weeks off the end of shooting season two when we got the news,” actor Siân Brooke tells Den of Geek. “I was so pleasantly surprised because it doesn’t really happen very much in this day and age, to have somebody support you and nail their colours to the mast the way that they have, it means a lot that they’re behind us.”

Blue Lights follows the progress of Brooke’s character Grace, with Annie (Katherine Devlin) and Tommy (Nathan Braniff), three new recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Grace is a former social worker, Annie’s a young local and Tommy comes from a family of academics. Belfast’s political context is key to the series, but the characters policing the city are even more central.

After the first series arrived to real acclaim in March 2023, filming on the follow-up began just months later in August of the same year, and series two arrived on screen in April 2024, airing both weekly and available to stream as a box-set. It didn’t feel like a long wait for fans keen to find out what happened to the team after they suffered a tragic loss, or to see the next step in Grace’s will-they-won’t-they relationship with patrol partner Stevie (Martin McCann).

The wait between series two and three though, promises to be a little longer. Instead of getting stuck back in to filming later this year ready for another spring air date, Brooke doesn’t expect to get back in uniform to film new Blue Lights until January 2025.

“It’s maybe a bit later [than last series] actually. For the turnaround, for them to get all their ducks in a row. I think it’ll be January time.”

That means the earliest fans might expect to see Blue Lights series three is autumn 2025, with a chance that the new six-episode series won’t debut until early 2026. Co-creator Declan Lawn hinted as much at the press launch for series two, suggesting that it could take two or three years for the next two series to arrive.

However long it takes, the goodwill that this character-led drama has built up over two excellent series means that whenever it arrives, its audience will be ready and waiting.

Blue Lights series one and two are available to stream now on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on BritBox in the US.