Netflix announced the release date for the final episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and we’ll have to wait a while.
Following the release of the first half of the comedy series’ episodes on May 30, the streaming giant announced Thursday the final episodes will begin streaming Jan. 25, after they were initially expected to arrive later this year.
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“Netflix has been very generous with the marketing for us and I think they want to be able to launch it properly and, with everything they have going right now, it’s just our feeling that it will take them a little while to find the space and time to do that. So that will be a good thing, I think, for us,” co-showrunner Robert Carlock told The Hollywood Reporter of the show ending in 2019.
Carlock added that when the team behind Kimmy Schmidt began working on the current season, and having to break it into two arts, the group saw it as a shortened fifth season, which would bring them to the five-season run they had originally envisioned for the series.
“We came into the season not necessarily thinking that way,” Carlock said. “But in the past few months, we’ve been thinking [the series] is heading toward its conclusion.”
“We were never quite sure what the life of the show wanted to be,” he added. “When we split up this fourth season into kind of a fourth and a fifth — just in the boring, most practical way, you could think of them as two short seasons — one wouldn’t be coming out until 2019, so it just felt like the right time to pull up stakes since we were kind of pushing ourselves into next year.”
Filming was halfway done when reports surfaced about Kimmy Schmidt‘s fourth season being its last. The time frame gave the cast and crew plenty of time to craft a proper ending.
Carlock, who co-created the comedy with Tina Fey, also said plans to wrap up the series with a movie are still in discussion, with a deal currently in the works.
“We now have a shorter runway than we originally thought we would and don’t want to overstuff it and rush it,” he said. “And there are things that I think would be fun to hold off for kind of a big epic finale in feature form.”
The series follows Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) as she continues to adjust to life in the 21st century after spending many years locked in a bunker by a crazy man. Joining Kimmy on her journey are her best friend and roommate, Titus Andromedon (Titus Burgess); her former-employer-turned-friend Jacqueline White (Jane Krakowski); and landlord Lillian Kaushtupper.
