Last summer, Manifest became one of the biggest streaming surprises of the entire year when it was added to Netflix’s lineup. The thrilling mystery series was a decent performer for NBC over the course of its three seasons, but it found an even bigger and more dedicated audience when it arrived on Netflix. Following a cancellation at NBC, Manifest, and the announcement helped further solidify its streaming success. While the show hasn’t been in the news cycle much as of late, it is somehow once again rising through the Netflix ranks.
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Netflix recently revealed the global streaming numbers from January 17th through January 23rd. Surprisingly, the first season of Manifest has found itself among the 10 most-watched TV seasons on the entire streamer over the course of the week. Manifest Season 1 was the eighth-most-watched English language series on Netflix around the globe during that seven-day period, with more than 20.7 million hours viewed. The debut season of the series brought in more viewership last week than the new installments of hit shows Cheer and Emily in Paris.
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.”
The first three seasons of Manifest are now streaming on Netflix.
