Manifest fans have been keeping their dream alive, and there’s something to be said for sticking to one’s guns over something, you know, fun that doesn’t harm anyone. TV can do that for us in a world where reality is rough on a daily basis. That’s why I’m enjoying the whole Manifest saga, which started as backlash to NBC cancelling what’s admittedly an objectively not-great show while it sat atop the Netflix Most Popular list. That’s wild in and of itself, and then there’s the actual content of the show, which involves a group of people who hop on a flight, arrive at their destination hours later, and find that five years of humanity passed in the interim. Cue threats to marriages and seemingly random voices dropping clues to crimes, and yeah, it’s nuts.
That is to say, I completely understand why the fans on the show are so passionate, even though I’m still working my way through Season 2. Also, the twists of the production/non-production itself are really something. First, Netflix supposedly decided a (paraphrased) “nope” to Season 4 while rans remained hell-bent upon saving the apparently doomed series. Creator Jeff Rake, who says that he’s plotted out a full-on, six-season run, urged people to stay strong, and then Stephen King showed himself to be a fan, and then a report indicated that Rake and the cast were having talks with Netflix. Not only that, but over this past weekend, Netflix started firing out device push-updates to alert users to the presence of Manifest Season 3, which was previously not available on the streaming service (although Peacock and Hulu had it).
That development led to a Top 3 spot on Netflix’s Most Popular list.
So, what now? We wait and wonder, but it sure as heck seems like Netflix is preparing to make things official. Season 3 being on the service (when it wasn’t yet) seems like the biggest clue so far that Netflix knows what the people want, and they (hopefully) want to make it happen. Of course, people waited for Hannibal to receive the same sort of fan service before that show’s existing seasons eventually disappeared from Netflix. Yet as fans of Lucifer can attest, sometimes, the Devil really is in the details, and Netflix dropped one heck of one with the appearance of Manifest Season 3.