After Manifest was cancelled by NBC, Netflix swooped in to save the popular mystery series, giving it one more season to answer all of the lingering cliffhangers and plot threads. Netflix handed Manifest a final order of 20 episodes, allowing the show to wrap up its story and giving fans the conclusion they’ve been asking for. The first batch of episodes from Season 4 will arrive on Netflix later this year, and subscribers around the globe are already preparing by rewatching the previous installments.
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Tuesday’s new edition of the Netflix Top 10 streaming charts shows a big spike in popularity for Manifest. All three previous seasons of Manifest ranked in the 10-biggest English-language TV seasons on Netflix for the entire week. The first season of the series ranked as the fifth-biggest English-language season from August 1st to August 7th, with more than 36 million hours viewed.
Series creator Jeff Rake originally planned for Manifest to tell its story over the course of six seasons. The series will only get four, but the final 20 episodes on Netflix will be enough to finish the story and resolve all of the cliffhangers.
“The endgame won’t change at all,” Rake told “For those who’ve been tracking this story through June and July, they’ll remember that I was hopeful in the early weeks after cancellation that someone would step up and allow us to make something as modest as a two-hour movie.”
“It would have been stressful and would not have been ideal, but I would have figured out my way through it,” the creator continued. “Given that I’ve had to go through the thought exercise this summer of how to get to the original endgame in two episodes, six episodes, or nine episodes, I feel like it’s an embarrassment of riches to have to have 20 episodes to tell the rest of the story. So yes, I have always talked about three more seasons — and part of that was chronological, because it’s always been my goal get to the series finale in real time in accordance with the five and a half years that the passengers had back — and that might have to adjust somewhat depending on how these episodes roll out. The good news is I am absolutely confident that 20 episodes gives me enough time to tell the entirety of the story as I always intended to. When I’ve talked in the past about having a roadmap all the way to the end of series, that didn’t mean that I had a roadmap for literally every single episode. I have a roadmap with a series of twists and turns and flags in the sand that we would ultimately hit in order to tell the the core stories within our mythology and within our relationship drama. So it will not be a particularly difficult exercise to overlay that same exact roadmap onto 20 episodes. It will be quite organic.”
Are you excited for the final season of Manifest? Let us know in the comments!
