When Does Vikings Season 7 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Vikings about?

Vikings began on the History Channel in 2013 as something genuinely surprising: a prestige-quality historical drama about Norse warriors that took both the violence and the mythology seriously. Travis Fimmel's Ragnar Lothbrok carried the early seasons almost entirely on his strange, feral charisma, and for a few years the show was some of the most entertaining television around. Raids, family betrayals, the first contact between Viking explorers and the English monasteries they were about to destroy, the slow corrosion of Ragnar's friendships and marriages. Creator Michael Hirst, who had previously worked on The Tudors, knew how to make history feel operatic without losing the specific, grubby texture of the period.

The tone mixes brutal combat with genuine spiritual weight. The Norse gods are not window dressing here. Characters pray, sacrifice, and receive visions, and the show treats all of it as real within its world. That seriousness of purpose, combined with Hirst's weakness for melodrama, gives Vikings an odd, sometimes unsteady quality. It can be genuinely moving one episode and wildly overwrought the next.

The audience response has been strong and sustained, as that IMDb rating reflects. Critics were warm on the early seasons and noticeably cooler as the show extended into its fifth and sixth seasons after Ragnar's departure, which is when the cast listed above became the primary drivers of the story. Ivar the Boneless, played by Alex Høgh Andersen with considerable intensity, holds the later seasons together better than most replacements would, but the show never quite recovered the focused, mythic pull of watching Fimmel do whatever it was Fimmel was doing.

Compared to Game of Thrones, which it was inevitably stacked against, Vikings is smaller, more grounded, and less interested in pure spectacle for its own sake. The political scheming matters, but so does the question of what a man owes his gods. That combination kept 89 episodes from feeling like pure franchise extension, even when the writing was stretching thin.

Created by Michael Hirst

Is Vikings renewed or cancelled?

Why did Vikings end?

Vikings ran for six seasons on History Channel (distributed later through Prime Video), and by most measures it ended on its own terms rather than being cut short. Creator Michael Hirst had always conceived the show as a saga with a finite shape, tracking the rise and fall of Ragnar Lothbrok and then the fates of his sons. Once Travis Fimmel's Ragnar was killed off in season four, the show had essentially completed its central story. Everything after that was denouement, however entertaining.

The back half of season six aired in late 2020, wrapping up storylines for Bjorn, Ivar, and the rest of the surviving Lothbrok clan. Ratings had softened considerably from the show's peak years, when it was one of History Channel's biggest draws, but the decline wasn't the reason it ended. Hirst had written toward a conclusion, and the show reached it. There's a difference between a series that gets pulled mid-story and one that simply arrives at its destination, and Vikings falls into the latter category.

A spinoff, Vikings: Valhalla, launched on Netflix shortly after, which suggests the IP still had commercial life in it. That actually reinforces the point: if the network or streamer thought the original series had more runway, they would have pushed for more. Instead, Hirst finished his story and the franchise continued in a different form with a new cast and a later time period. Vikings ended because it was done, not because anyone gave up on it.

Vikings Season 7 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

Vikings seasons

Vikings trailer

Where to watch Vikings

NetflixstreamAmazon VideobuyGoogle Play Moviesbuy

Vikings latest news