It arrives three years and change after Manifest's fourth and final season closed the original story, and the creative team is largely the same one that finished it.
Who is making it
- Jeff Rake, who created Manifest, co-creates and co-showruns.
- Margaret Easley and Laura Putney, writers and co-EPs on the original, share the co-creator and co-showrunner credits.
- Robert Zemeckis and Jack Rapke of Compari Entertainment executive produce, alongside Len Goldstein and Jacqueline Levine.
- Warner Bros. Television is the studio, as it was on Manifest.
The premise
A plane crash-lands in Denver and the passengers walk out with no memory of who they are, where they came from or why they are there. A young social worker and a rookie Homeland Security agent team up with them to stop a humanity-ending catastrophe, and work out along the way that they are part of the puzzle they are trying to solve.
So: same shape, new plane, new city, amnesia instead of five missing years. Rake called it "a brand-new mystery from that world," and Netflix's Jinny Howe pitched the returning team as the guarantee of creative continuity.
Why Netflix is doing this at all
Manifest ran three seasons on NBC from 2018 to 2021 and was cancelled just as its first two seasons landed on Netflix and became an enormous hit there. The streamer then bought a fourth and final season and split it into two 10-episode halves in 2022 and 2023. It is one of the clearest cases on record of Netflix reviving a network show and being proved right.
The original was a network mystery box that Netflix rescued after somebody else gave up on it. A spinoff is what happens when the streamer decides the audience was never really there for the ending.
No cast, no episode count and no premiere date yet. The only date they gave you was 8/28.