Cancelled NBC Show Trying To Get Revived By Netflix
Netflix might be reviving a canceled NBC show which would delight fans. It's one of the most popular shows on the streaming platform
This article is more than 2 years old
Last week NBC disappointed plenty of fans when they canceled Manifest after its third season. The show was seeing dwindling ratings on the network and yet had been building up a following somewhere else. That’s because it had become one of the most popular shows on Netflix. Well, now it looks like the streaming platform might revive it. Deadline is reporting that there is some movement to move the show onto the streaming platform as a new home.
This new deal to possibly bring Manifest over to Netflix is now in the hands of negotiations between Warner Bros. and Netflix to see if the production costs could transfer over to the streamer in a viable way. The good news would seem to be that Netflix has built-in knowledge already of how fans have been interacting with and watching the show. For the third week in a row, it was ranked #1 among television shows on the platform and Giant Freakin Robot had it last week that there was significant fan upheaval when the latter found out the show was canceled.
Additionally, as Deadline points out, there is also a baseline for this kind of specific deal with a bigger budget show moving midstream from a network with Warner Bros and Netflix already brokering a deal for Lucifer in the past. That was a win for both houses and there’s clear incentive to get something done here as well. Because we live at an odd intersection of network television and streaming platforms, with certain metrics and incentives not translating 1:1 between the two. NBC had seen declining ratings over the three seasons of Manifest and chose to have it canceled. But Netflix clearly sees things differently and definitely has a divergent viewing audience. It could be the perfect match there.
If Netflix picked up Manifest after it was canceled,, fans wouldn’t be left hanging on a show that had clearly picked up a significant amount of steam off of NBC. The show follows the events surrounding the disappearance of a place mid-flight. While the passengers on the plane bound for JFK experience just a bit of in-flight turbulence, the world they land in is completely different. That’s because in the “real world” more than five years have passed and the plane has been “missing” that whole time.
From a genre perspective, Netflix would definitely be picking up a supernatural show that even bends that genre just a bit. The passengers of the plane not only have to deal with the idea that they’ve somehow skipped ahead five years, but the world they left might not be the one they are in. The story was building toward a bigger reveal through its first few seasons and when NBC canceled there was a sense of a missed opportunity when it came to the story.
Time will tell if Warner Bros and Netflix can work out the particulars behind moving Manifest over to the streaming network. Even if it was more of a stripped down program without quite the same operating budget, fans would no doubt get behind whatever small changes needed to happen there in order to get a resolution on the story.
