Manifest destiny: How a canceled NBC drama came back from the dead

Peter Kramer/Netflix Ben Stone (Josh Dallas) reunites with sister Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) in 'Manifest' season 4.

Melissa Roxburgh was the first one to see it. Call it fate. Her character on Manifest, Detective Michaela Stone, was the first to experience the supernatural phenomenon known as a "calling" after she and her fellow passengers on Flight 828 landed in New York City — five-and-a-half years after their expected arrival. Now Roxburgh was the first of her castmates to experience this new sign: Her show, the one that had just been canceled by NBC, was streaming in full on Netflix.

Series creator Jeff Rake received a text message from Roxburgh in May 2021, a few days after the broadcast TV network gave them the axe. It was a trailer for Manifest, now available to watch on the streaming platform. "She said, 'What is this?' I had no idea," Rake tells EW. "No one had ever mentioned a thing to me about Manifest premiering on Netflix. The rest of my executive producers had no idea, studio executives I worked with had no idea, nobody in my orbit knew."

Neither did actor Josh Dallas, who plays Michaela's brother, Ben Stone. "We had the devastation and the shock of being canceled, and then this groundswell of people finding the show for the first time in many cases on Netflix," he says. That groundswell kept growing and growing and growing until, as has happened only a handful of times in Hollywood, Manifest was uncanceled. Following the show's newfound ratings success on Netflix, with a boost from a fervent fan-driven social media campaign, the streaming platform decided to give the drama one more season, split into two parts, to give the story a proper conclusion. Even now, as Rake and Dallas are in the midst of filming the back half of the new 20-episode arc, the cast and crew are still in awe.

"Extraordinary and just nothing but gratitude," Dallas remarks. "The reason we make these shows are for the people, for the fans. The fact that they took this story and these characters and brought them all into their hearts and wanted to see so much more of the story and mobilize themselves into this group to bring it back was humbling and gratifying and really moving."

Peter Kramer/Netflix Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) and Ben Stone (Josh Dallas) are back at it in 'Manifest' season 4 sneak peek.

Step 1: Rally the fans

The sequence of events was a bit more involved. Rake had shows canceled before (The CW's Beauty and the Beast and The Tomorrow People, NBC's The Mysteries of Laura). "There are telltale signs, usually involving a lot of silence," he says. "And that's what happened all spring while we were finishing up production on season 3."

Rake admits Manifest wasn't doing so well in the ratings at this point in 2021. The series came out the gate hot in September 2018 with a concept about the people of Flight 828 arriving back home after a seemingly routine trip, albeit with some stormy turbulence, and being told they've all been missing for years. As they acclimate back into a world that has moved on without them, they all start to experience mysterious "callings" from some higher power that guides them to help others. The show's ratings dipped every season until NBC was airing two episodes a night in those last few weeks of season 3.

"I don't know that I would go so far as to say it was inevitable, that the writing was on the wall that we were canceled," Rake says. "I was feeling a little bit pessimistic. So when we got the news, it was not a shock to the system." Dallas had a similar reaction: "I remember being really sad, and I remember being shocked. Then I remember that I'm an actor in Hollywood and this is show business. It's not always that the creative part and show business match up. Those things are always sort of at odds, but I was definitely sad that we didn't get to finish our story."

When Manifest then arrived on Netflix a few days later and quickly landed on the platform's list of Top 10 most popular programming, that pessimism turned into "reckless optimism," says Rake. He began tweeting about his hope to keep Manifest alive, perhaps by shopping the show around to other networks, but it would be some time before Netflix would officially board his return trip. "When you're the showrunner, you're like the coach for the team. You want to keep your cast, writers, crew, everybody feeling hopeful. So I assumed that role right away," he says.

Step 2: Pray

Rake didn't have any concrete evidence that Manifest would live again. Then, a month later, the title was still topping the Netflix charts in the U.S. and Canada, so the coach got the ball rolling. He reached out to the executives at Warner Bros. Television, which had produced and distributed the show, and urged them to contact Netflix. Meanwhile, he was making noise on social media, adding to the encouraging cheers from the fandom. But Netflix wasn't so encouraging at the time. As Rake tells it, the head honchos knew Manifest was popular, but they didn't know yet how many people were sticking around to watch all the episodes.

"Usually when a show drops on Netflix, it's eight episodes, 10 episodes. For us, it was a 42-episode dump," Rake explains. "It's hard for people to watch 42 entire episodes over a weekend or a week. So at first, Netflix took a wait-and-see approach." By this point, Rake had also reignited conversations with NBC, which clearly didn't work out. But after weeks of constant success from the first three seasons on Netflix, the streamer took a deeper look at Manifest and that's when negotiations began in earnest.

Peter Kramer/Netflix Michaela Stone (Melissa Roxburgh) and Jared Vasquez (J.R. Ramirez) are back together... on a bench, at least, in 'Manifest' season 4.

The challenge then became getting the gang back together. Everyone in the cast and crew had been released after NBC canceled Manifest. Matt Long, who plays Zeke, took a job filming a pilot for another series, something Rake says "any reasonable actor in his situation" would have done. Then came the negotiations to get everyone back, which the showrunner says resulted in "ugly, ugly conversations that happened behind closed doors."

"There were hard-fought negotiations and that's always tough," he explains. "It's business. There were a lot of tough ones where people play chicken. Who's going to cave first? So, of course, that would come up: 'Do you absolutely need that person?' 'Could the story go on without that character?' 'Could you recast that role?' Truthfully, the answer was no. You might not tell an agent or a manager, but no one was replaceable. Putting aside how much I love everybody, everybody was inherent. Thankfully, it all worked out."

Step 3: Give the people what they want

When Rake set out to make Manifest, he had a six-season story in mind. He didn't have too many specifics mapped out, but there were the big flagpoles planted in his mind for where he wanted to go. Now that Manifest will end with four seasons, he and the writers planned this as the final season he always had in mind, while mixing in elements that would've been introduced had they more to work with.

"I've been treating it as two seasons. That is to say, we were gifted 20 episodes, which are being characterized to the world as Season 4, Part 1 [and] Season 4, Part 2," Rake says. The first 10 episodes comprising Part 1 will premiere on Netflix Nov. 4. A premiere for Part 2 has not been announced. "I just decided, for my purposes, that I was going to treat the story as if we had been gifted two 10-episode seasons."

Season 3 ended in tragedy and shock for the Stone family. Ben's wife Grace (Athena Karkanis) was stabbed to death by Angelina Meyer (Holly Taylor), another survivor of Flight 828 who then kidnapped their baby, Eden. Meanwhile, their son, Cal Stone (Jack Messina), had touched the tail fin of the 828 airplane and completely vanished, only to reappear five years older and portrayed by actor Ty Doran.

Season 4 begins two years after these events, and the Stone family is in a very dark place. Dallas jokes Ben is now rocking his "grief beard." "I had time to grow Ben's grief beard, which I guess it started out of the grief of being canceled," he says. On a more serious note, the beard is a manifestation of "a cyclone of catastrophic moments" his character is still dealing with two years on.

"Ben is questioning everything, not only the callings, but God and the universe and his own good-ness versus evil," Dallas says. "The loss of Grace has left this enormous void in him and a profound depth of anger. The thing about anger is it begs to stick around. It can rob you of your light and leave you with nothing to offer. It makes you hurt the ones who love you, and Ben does a fair bit of that. I think a part of him wills that sorrow to persist, because he thinks that if he lets go of it and heals from his grief, he'll somehow lose Grace forever."

Peter Kramer/Netflix Josh Dallas is rocking "Ben's grief beard" opposite Matt Long's Zeke Landon in 'Manifest' season 4.

The beard itself became a logistical nightmare for production. Rake confirms season 4 has adopted flashbacks in order to catch viewers up on what happened during the time jump. These scenes will regularly intercut with the main story arc in the present day — which meant there needed to be a lot of coordination around when Dallas could actually shave and when he could film these flashbacks. "It held everyone hostage, including my face," he says with a laugh.

The family story of the Stones dealing with the events of the season 3 finale comprises most of Part 1, Rake states. "The aftermath of that tragedy and how it has impacted every member of that family, their journey battling between desire for vengeance and attempting to get their head around the idea of forgiveness and healing is really at the center." He also notes, "There's an entirely different aspect of this block of episodes that is steeped in the scientific and mythological" that he wants to leave as a surprise. "The tonic" to the dark arc, he says, is "a really sexy and exhilarating mythological story." Rake, however, does assert that season 4 will feel more urgent for the characters.

Being two years out from season 3 means the story of Manifest is now two years before the big Death Date, the day everyone fears. It's believed that a person who has miraculously foiled death faces a second death, which occurs after the exact amount of time that passed between their original death and their resurrection. James Griffin (Marc Menchaca), a criminal from season 1, mysteriously survived after being trapped in a car underwater for more than three days, only to die again on land three days later from coughing up water. Kory Jephers (DazMann Still) and brothers Jace (James McMenamin) and Pete Baylor (Devin Harjes), three men involved in drug dealing, all seemed to drown in a frozen lake in season 2. Though they later walked away resurrected, they too would meet their second death. Zeke was able to survive his Death Date, but those on Flight 828 fear they could meet a similar fate when they reach June 2, 2024, which marks five-and-a-half years after the plane landed back home.

"That makes things quite more urgent, makes people a little bit more out of their mind," Rake says. "Even the most rational among us would start to lose it as you get closer and closer to a potential doomsday."

Rake acknowledges it's "very thematic" for Manifest, a show grappling with religious questions and the world beyond, to come back from the dead. The architect's plans for the show at large have changed — he might even be thinking about the story's flow differently given the new format of dropping 10 episodes at once — but he doesn't feel anything has been compromised. "We're going to finish exactly where we always were going to finish," he vows. "It's just a little tighter in the middle, but sometimes there's a great benefit as a storyteller. It's forced us to avoid meandering and really focus on being as suspenseful as we can be, make our relationships as juicy as they can be, make our mythology as tantalizing as it can be."

As he speaks from his production office in New York, the crew is filming episode 16 out of 20 and the writers' room has officially closed. Rake takes a moment to reflect on this journey. "It's incredibly surreal for me to have the opportunity to finish what we started," he remarks. "I doubt anything like this will happen again in my career."

Manifest hits Netflix on Nov. 4

Make sure to check out EW's Fall TV Preview cover story — as well as all of our 2022 Fall TV Preview content, releasing over 22 days through Sept. 29.

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• Manifest season 4 first footage sees Michaela chase a calling

• Manifest begins filming final season in New York after Netflix rescue

• Manifest creator on the show surviving its death date and what to expect from the final 20 episodes