Netflix is hatching a prequel to Outer Banks
Netflix is plotting a return to a YA hit even as it bows out with Season 5 on Aug. 20 — only this trip heads back two decades.
When Outer Banks dropped in April 2020—right as we were all trapped indoors dreaming of literally any place with sunshine and a body of water—it basically printed money for Netflix. The thing's been a staple for the streamer ever since, thanks to heady doses of treasure hunts, feuding families, and, if you ask the fanbase, at least one character death they're still stewing over. Well, with the final season about to land, Netflix looks ready to go back to that particular beach one more time, with a prequel series now officially in the works.
Outer Banks Season 3 racked up close to 3.2 billion viewing minutes in its first week and Season 4 clocked 15.5 million views right out the gate.
The next move: Backwards
According to Deadline and a few crumbs dropped by the creative team, the new series—currently referred to as Kildare—steps back about two decades before the events we know. The setup? It's all about the early days of the island's long-running class battle: the loaded Kooks from Figure 8 versus the working-class Pogues from The Cut. So rather than more teen treasure hunters, we're apparently getting the origin story for all the drama that would someday mess up John B and co.
This isn't Netflix palming off a spinoff on some random hired-gun showrunner either. The prequel is being put together by the original Outer Banks brains trust—Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke. That'll soothe anyone scarred by other, less successful Netflix spin-offs. They're planning a mix of new faces and the previous generation of familiar families, so expect younger versions of the parents to pop up—particularly JJ's, as the most recent season unveiled some very soap-adjacent skeletons in that family closet.
- Set roughly 20 years before Outer Banks
- Backstory for the Kooks and Pogues class divide
- JJ's parents, Larissa Genrette and Chandler Groff, now definitely central characters, with Larissa's fatal boating accident lining up perfectly with this timeline
- Sarah and Rafe's parents likely to appear as well
- Original showrunners in charge; no casting or release date yet
Shooting in the right state (finally)
The show's been nominally set in North Carolina the whole way through, but after five seasons of filming in Charleston, Jonas Pate said publicly (as early as 2023) that he wanted to actually shoot in Wilmington for the prequel. Here’s how he summed it up to Port City Daily:
"We're looking to film it in Wilmington."
Don’t expect anything on your screen soon, though. All we’ve really got is: development has started, the prequel does exist as a project, but there’s no cast, no episode count, and not a word about a timeline. Netflix hasn’t made it official-official, so this could end up like The Runarounds—the other Outer Banks-adjacent series the Pates tried, which wound up at Prime Video instead. Still, since this fills a clear gap for Netflix (losing its flagship YA drama as of tomorrow), odds are this one will see daylight.