Lucifer goes full noir in Season 5 first look while writers room ramps up for S6

Lucifer, the demonic show about the Devil (Tom Ellis) himself helping cops solve crimes (for some godforsaken [ha!] reason), is on its way back to Netflix after being resurrected by the streaming service after Fox damned it to the depths. Now heading towards a fifth season — which will air its first eight episodes in August — the Ildy Modrovich and Joe Henderson-run show also picked up a renewal for a sixth and final season.

But the behind-the-scenes confirmations are one thing and getting an actual look at what's on the way for the Prince of Darkness and crew is quite another. Thankfully, a first look at Season 5 has arrived like a bat out of hell.

To top it all off, the first look is a hyper-stylized blast from the past as Lucifer looks back on the Devil's first case. Yes, Lucifer is going full noir. "It Never Ends Well for the Chicken," the fourth episode of the season, goes to '40s L.A. and digs into all things Maze (Lesley Ann-Brandt).

Take a look:

Black-and-white never looked so good. The hats! The suits! The shadows! These shots look like they're straight Out of the Past or possibly hailing from Nightmare Alley. And that's perfect for Ellis.

"Tom Ellis is made for this style," Modrovich told Entertainment Weekly. "He kind of is Cary Grant. I think there's always been something about his portrayal of Lucifer [that's] old school, that harkens back to the extravagance and elegance of old Hollywood and just noir."

Getting there was part of the fun, as the show decided to be as extra as possible by matching its throwback storyline to its aesthetic.

"Whenever you play [with] flashbacks, the question is always, 'What's the time frame that can reflect a person?' What's nice about noir is it's detective stories, but Lucifer isn't a detective yet. So what we're almost seeing, to a certain extent, is Lucifer's first case," said Henderson.

Modrovich explained, "There was a moment in our arc where Lucifer needed to give us a little backstory on a character and tell us what happened to [him] a long time ago and we thought, 'Perfect moment for a Princess Bride moment. So, let's open it up and have Lucifer tell this story to someone. And if we're really doing an homage to Princess Bride, that person should be Trixie [Scarlett Estevez].'"

And apparently Trixie is the key to why some of the actors are playing characters of the opposite sex — all the story's characters are drawn from Lucifer's present-day pals...even if that means a little gender-swapping. Aimee Garcia, for example, sports a 'stache in one pic. "The fun of it is you get Lauren German playing a guy who happens to look like Lauren German," Henderson said. This oddball opportunity (which Henderson noted needed to avoid parody) came from Netflix's extended S5 episode order. "When we went from 10 to 16, [at] first we were like, 'How do we do this?'" Henderson said. "But literally within three days we were like, 'How could we ever had told the story without these stories?'"

The first look comes just as those behind the show dropped a photo of their own — looking forward not to the upcoming fifth season, but the final sixth. Henderson shared a Zoom-centric picture on Twitter showcasing the writers room getting back in action (pandemic-style) for the devilish streaming series' last hurrah.

Check it out:

“Season 6 #Lucifer writers room is a GO!” Henderson wrote.

But not for a while — at least not until after the first half of Lucifer’s fifth season hits Netflix on Aug. 21.