Some Bad News About ‘Outer Banks’ Season 5 Release Date

Netflix has proudly declared that the fifth and final season of Outer Banks has begun production, with a new set photo of the group in costume minus (spoilers) JJ, who was killed off in season 4, barring some sort of miraculous resurrection.

So, good news, right? Well, not if you were hoping this meant that Outer Banks season 5 would arrive any time soon. While it’s great that production is starting now, this is a wild nine months after airing of season 4, and with how long it takes to actually film and produce a show like this, that’s bad news for its overall release date timeline.

Outer Banks season 4 started production in June 2023 and was released in October 2024. That’s a gap of 15 months for filming and post-production, lengthy even in this current streaming era. So, if we’re talking 15 months from July 2025, if we’re rounding up, that’s a season 5 debut in October 2026, a full two years after season 4. This would be longer than any gap between seasons the show has had so far. It’s not clear whether or not the final season will be broken up into two halves of five episodes as we saw with season 4. But it’s likely, given Netflix’s addiction to doing this.

It’s just yet another example of how exhausting these gaps between seasons are in the modern streaming era. There’s a new piece from whats-on-netflix that articulates this well in terms of data, showing that the average time between Netflix seasons is 20 months. And that very much hurts these shows:

“As we reported earlier this year, the impact of shows returning after such a long period means that viewership has likely shifted. Out of all the returning 2024 shows, Netflix’s viewership data suggest that only one show grew its audience: Bridgerton, which rose 13% from season 2 to 3. The majority of other returning shows weren’t so lucky.”

The reasons? More elaborate, expensive shows, but also lengthy post-production, which involves dubbing the show in dozens of different languages given its global reach (this is true for most streaming services, but Netflix especially). It also has to do with actor availability, and in the case of Outer Banks, really all these main actors have been hopping around different projects during these gaps because production takes this long. But doing so can make production take even longer in some cases.

Could this change? Now that COVID and strikes are over, it’s possible, but we’ve only seen year-long breaks between a handful of major streaming shows, with only a few points of good news like yearly installments of 15-episode The Pitt, a unicorn. Outer Banks? Not a unicorn.

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