After being unceremoniously cancelled by NBC after its third season, Manifest is moving to Netflix to wrap up its story. The popular mystery series has a 20-episode final season on the way, and it appears that the cast and crew are about to return to start putting this last run of episodes together. Netflix hasn’t officially revealed any kind of firm release date or window for Manifest Season 4 just yet, but a new report suggests that cameras will be rolling by the end of the month.
According to Murphy’s Multiverse, production on Manifest Season 4 is currently scheduled to begin on November 18th. We’re just a couple of weeks away from that date, so Manifest’s return is even closer than many expected.
With 20 total hours of TV ahead for Manifest in its final season, the production will take awhile, probably a little longer than most shows that only have 10 or 13-episode seasons. Given how Netflix has rolled out other “final seasons” of popular shows in the past, it isn’t much of a stretch to think that the streamer will break up Manifest‘s last 20 episodes into two parts, releasing them at two different times.
Manifest creator Jeff Rake originally planned for the show to last for six seasons. The series is only getting four, but the supersized final season is enough to wrap things up while still delivering the original ending Rake always had in mind.
“The endgame won’t change at all,” Rake told EW earlier this year. “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 Manifest‘s final season? Let us know in the comments!