‘Manifest’: Stephen King Joins Masses Calling for the Show to Be Saved

Stephen King joined the hordes of fans on social media this week begging the TV industry to save Manifest. The NBC drama was canceled back in June, but there have been rumblings that it might be picked up in another form — perhaps on Netflix. On Tuesday, King let fans know he was hoping for the best along with them.

King tweeted the hashtag for”Save Manifest” along with so many other fans this week. The other did not editorialize or explain his love of the show further, but just seeing his name beside the campaign went a long way. Manifest is a supernatural drama that falls right into King’s wheelhouse, so it makes sense that he is a fan. Still, there’s no guarantee that the show will be back at this point.

Manifest was created by Jeff Rake, who has said that he envisioned it as a six-season series. It had some die-hard fans on broadcast TV, but not enough to give it the ratings it needed to survive. However, like so many other shows, it found a second life on Netflix.

After Manifest was added to the Netflix catalog, it bowled over other summer blockbusters to become one of the top titles on the service. That made it seem like a plausible pickup for Netflix, especially based on the history of other rescued shows like Lucifer.

Adding to the plausibility, Rake said that he does not necessarily need six seasons to satisfactorily end the series. Manifest made it through 3 seasons on NBC, so to finish it as planned it would have to go to Season 6. In June, however, Rake told Entertainment Weekly that that is no longer the only way.

“Twenty days after we’ve premiered on Netflix, I’ve kind of moved away from the plan of finding a home for seasons 4, 5, and 6 of Manifest, even though I’ve always talked about Manifest being a six-season show,” Rake explained. “Back in the day, I laid out a six-season roadmap for NBC, and I’m halfway through. I had giant cliffhangers in the season 3 finale, so I had every intention to have three more seasons to slow-burn the back half of the story.”

“I’m reading the writing on the wall that we may not find a home for three more seasons of the show, so I moved to plan B: Some platform would bankroll a feature or a movie finale, like we saw with Timeless, Firefly, and Deadwood,” he continued. “I just need a modest budget to tell the story. I am personally sketching out how to consolidate the back half of the series into a much more streamlined, cut-to-the-chase two-hour finale that would distill all of the hanging chads of the series. That’s where my head is at. There is a huge appetite for people wanting to know what’s that end of the story, what happened to the passengers, what ultimately happened to that airplane.”

Fans are dying to see Rake bring this idea to fruition, and now we know that King is among them. So far, neither NBC or Netflix has announced anything official.