It's back! The long-awaited fourth season of The Expanse returns on its new network, Amazon Prime. It will now apparently also air a future fifth season.
May 2018 initially looked like an anxious month for fans of television's best sci-fi show in years, The Expanse. The ambitious SyFy series based on James SA Corey's beloved novels had just the right mix of visual gusto, gripping action, geopolitical drama, and addictively tense pacing to keep us glued for its three seasons. (We learned Belter! We podcasted!) But then, unexpectedly, SyFy did what SyFy does—it cancelled the show ahead of its S3 finale.
Luckily, Expanse fans know the rest of the story. Less than a month later at National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his company would be saving the series and producing a fourth season as an Amazon original. And this weekend, Bezos and co. had more good news: before a single episode of The Expanse S4 airs on Amazon this December, the show has officially been renewed for a season five.
Variety reports that Amazon made the announcement during the Television Critics Association summer press tour over the weekend. The series showrunner to date, Naren Shankar, will presumably keep steering the ship going forward. While pre-ordering seasons of television in this regard isn't a rarity (based on its past, Netflix probably already has the Duffer Bros. moving on S5 of Stranger Things, for instance), the news stands out a bit more considering The Expanse's reported ratings struggles at SyFy and subsequent cancellation. Though Amazon doesn't green light everything in the same manner as its primary streaming service counterpart, the company has shown a willingness to strategically spend and support sci-fi and fantasy genre fare, from Good Omens to its future (hyper, hyper expensive) Lord of the Rings series. In that vein, The Expanse likely couldn't have landed at a better second home.
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