Is Miss Scarlet pregnant in season 5?

Miss Scarlet is back for a fifth season, but eagle-eyed viewers have noticed that their favourite private eye is looking a little different this time around - prompting questions about if the character is expecting.

Miss Scarlet has returned to screens in the UK, and viewers couldn't be more delighted. The series being rebranded from Miss Scarlet and The Duke to simply Miss Scarlet, left many fans wondering why Stuart Martin left the role of The Duke and whether the character would return in season 5 - this is something we've delved into for you.

A cosy drama that evokes similar feelings to shows such as All Creatures Great and Small and The Hardacres, Miss Scarlet's solid fan base don't miss a trick. This means many series devotees have noticed that Miss Scarlet could be expecting her own mini detective, and have been wondering whether she is actually pregnant in season 5.

Is Miss Scarlet pregnant in season 5?

Although the character Miss Scarlet isn't pregnant in the series, actress Kate Phillips was indeed expecting a baby when filming took place, and gave birth to her second child in December 2024.

Although the flowing aesthetic of Kate's period costumes on the series hid her pregnancy well and the baby wasn't written into the storyline, it's very difficult to fully conceal a beautifully burgeoning pregnancy bump.

Kate is fiercely private about her personal life, and rarely talks about her partner, fellow actor Oliver Chris, or her three-year-old daughter and new baby.

The only time the actress has mentioned her eldest child in an interview was in conversation with The Times. Discussing her experience of labour, she recalled it was "nearly a day of extraordinary agony".

As Kate was just about to appear in BBC period drama Wolf Hall at the time of the interview, she added, "How the [expletive] did women do this in the Tudor period?"

It must've been an easy decision for the series creators not to include a pregnancy in the show for Miss Scarlet - that would've been quite the scandal! Especially as we know she had a quick liaison with The Duke before he left for new adventures in America. An unmarried mother in Victorian England would not have gone down well.

Kate Phillips has spoken about Eliza Scarlet being a woman trying to survive in a man's world. Speaking about her character, she said, "You’ve got this woman living in Victorian era London, rooted in her time and in her moment, in the context of an age where women don’t have rights."

She added, "People would not anticipate or expect a woman, particularly of her middle class/upper-middle-class stature, to be making a profession as a private detective, where she’d likely find herself in compromising situations.

"But then, what’s really exciting about the show is that you see her release herself from all of those constraints, against all the odds. Of course, the tone of the show allows you a kind of artistic license - I don’t know of any real-life sources of women who were fighting crime in that way."

She concluded by revealing a hope that at some point in history, there really was a woman who was fighting crime and making a name for herself - that woman might just not have been written about in the history books.