Virgin River Picked Up For Third Season

Netflix announced today via social media that it has picked up the romantic drama Virgin River for [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Netflix announced today via social media that it has picked up the romantic drama Virgin River for a third season, doing so via a short video featuring series stars Alexander Breckinridge and Martin Henderson. Based on the Virgin River novels by Robyn Carr, the first season premiered on Netflix in 2019, with the second season hitting in November of this year. It follows Melinda "Mel" Monroe, who answers an ad to work as a midwife and nurse practitioner in the remote Northern California town of Virgin River, thinking it will be the perfect place to start fresh after the death of her husband.

Per the series sell, "Soon, Mel discovers that small-town living isn't quite as simple as she expected. She must learn to heal herself before she can truly make Virgin River her home."

"We just want to say a huge thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making season 2 such a big success for Virgin River," Henderson says in the video, "and because of that..."

"...season 3 has been picked up by Netflix," Breckenridge concludes.

You can see the video below.

The show's third-season pickup seemed likely; after the first season was a big hit with audiences, the show's second season ended on a cliffhanger, frustrating some fans who were acutely aware that a third season had not yet been picked up.

If you haven't seen it, the series plays a bit like a nighttime soap in the vein of Desperate Housewives or Dallas, but with a Lifetime or Hallmark movie tone that removes some of the sex and violence usually associated with shows like that. It's a small-town drama with plenty of low-stakes conflicts and the occasional deep, dark secret for characters played by familiar faces like Tim Matheson (The West Wing), Lexa Doig (Arrow), and Annette O'Toole (Smallville).

Netflix has increasingly moved its original content into that earnest, wholesome space, developing series like this and movies like The Princess Switch which speak to the Hallmark audience. It was perhaps inevitable that bigger competitors would try to ape that model once the Hallmark approach got popular enough that "Hallmark movies" could be a genre or brand unto themselves, where saying just those two words communicates the idea to casual viewers.

Virgin River's first two seasons appear on Netflix now.

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