When Does Manifest Season 5 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Manifest about?

Manifest is built around one of those high-concept premises that television loves: a plane lands, and the world has moved on five years without its passengers. Families have grieved, spouses have remarried, children have grown. The show is genuinely good at the immediate, human mess of that situation, particularly in its first season, when Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas are navigating what it means to come back to lives that closed around your absence. Roxburgh in particular brings more to the role than the material sometimes deserves.

The tone is a specific kind of network-drama earnest, somewhere between procedural and mythology-heavy serialized mystery. The passengers start receiving visions they call "callings," which guide them toward helping strangers in need, and this is where the show gets tricky. At its best it feels like Lost's more optimistic cousin. At its worst it stacks mysteries on top of unanswered mysteries until the show is mostly architecture with no interior. The religious undertones grow heavier as the seasons progress, and viewers who find that kind of cosmic-destiny framing irritating will find less and less to hold onto.

NBC canceled it after season three, and the fan response was loud enough that Netflix picked it up for a fourth and final season. That story is almost more interesting than anything in the show itself: Manifest became a genuine streaming hit after cancellation, people bingeing the backlog and then demanding resolution. Critics were never especially enthusiastic, but audiences voted with their queues. The IMDb score of 7 reflects that split fairly accurately, a show its fans are deeply invested in and everyone else finds perfectly skippable.

Season four wraps the mythology up, which is more than most resurrected shows manage. Whether the resolution satisfies depends almost entirely on how much tolerance you have for shows that treat faith and fate as literal plot mechanics.

Created by Jeff Rake

Is Manifest renewed or cancelled?

Why did Manifest end?

Manifest is genuinely unusual in television history because it was cancelled and then un-cancelled, which shapes the whole story of how it ended. NBC pulled the plug after season three in 2021, despite a passionate fan campaign that drove the show to the top of Netflix's most-watched charts after its back catalog landed on the platform. Netflix took notice, picked it up, and ordered a fourth and final season. That final season was always framed as a conclusion, not an open-ended renewal, so the show ended on its own terms rather than getting cut off again.

The Netflix deal was structured specifically to wrap the story up. Creator Jeff Rake had long talked about a six-season plan, so season four was a compromise, split into two parts to give the narrative enough room to land. By that point, the show had found its real audience on streaming rather than traditional broadcast, which is partly why NBC had trouble justifying its costs in the first place. Live ratings had softened considerably by season three, and NBC operates on a very different economic model than a streamer that values catalog depth and subscriber retention over weekly numbers.

So the ending was planned, if not quite the ending Rake originally envisioned. Manifest got more closure than most cancelled shows ever receive, which is rare enough to be worth noting. It concluded because Netflix was willing to fund a finale season for a built-in audience of binge-watchers, not because anyone felt the story had reached its natural limit. Whether the ending satisfied that audience is a separate question, but the show did get to finish.

Manifest Season 5 Release Date

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