Obviously, Outlander is more than just steamy sex scenes. But at its core, this is a show about Jamie and Claire’s relationship—and their intimate moments, sexual or not, are important to fans. It’s also important that this series consistently shows female pleasure and consent as sexy, as we’ve pointed out before.

But season four, which just wrapped, was largely focused on setting up new characters and storylines for the series. Sure, the couple made a new home for themselves in colonial America, but most of our time was spent diving deeper into Brianna and Roger’s story. While it’s exciting to see where that goes, it meant less screen time for Jamie and Claire, and the intimate moments we did get were often cut short, fading to black before things heated up.

For many fans, this was frustrating. “The show is brimming with adventures, cliffhangers, great characters and performances, social commentary, and lots of sentimentality,” Andrée Poppleton wrote on Outlandercast.com. “It has lost touch, however, with the thrust and depth (puns intended) of the writings of Diana Gabaldon, who shows us a relationship like nothing we have seen before on television—an egalitarian relationship where the joy, intensity, fun, playfulness, and excitement of being a couple never stops for Claire and Jamie, despite the passing of years and all the dramas that develop and revolve around them.”

We asked co–executive producer Maril Davis about this shift at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “I think every season is different,” she tells Glamour. “This season we were introducing more characters, and there was a lot of story to get in. We’ve always talked about the sex scenes—we love them too—but they have to be organic to the story.”

Sometimes, she says, the story just doesn’t allow for as many slowdown times—intimate moments between Jamie and Claire, specifically—that fans can get in the books. “I do anticipate a return, hopefully, to that next season a little more,” she says. “Every season has its different storylines and where we’re going. It can’t always re-create the first season, which was very special, but it just has to be within the story and feel like it’s organic. That’s something we work on, and the actors work on. It’s a collaboration.”

As a fan herself, Davis says she totally gets that a fade-to-black in the middle of a sex scene might not be satisfying for some fans. But “this is the fifth season, and we’re trying to find those intimate moments without always having to show everything and putting actors in that position. But I get it! I want everyone to be satisfied.”

The next season will start production some time this year, though she won’t reveal exact timing yet. As for the storyline, Davis says they hear truly every kind of request from fans. “It’s hard to please everyone,” she jokes. But production knows the “heart and soul” of the story is Claire and Jamie: “We never forget that.”

Reporting by Jessica Radloff. Anna Moeslein is a senior editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @annamoeslein.

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