I Hate-Watched Four Seasons of Manifest and So Should You!

(This post contains spoilers, but that’s like saying there’s some mold on milk that’s been out on the counter for a week).

I don’t watch much TV as I prefer to spend my limited free time on more erudite pursuits like books and dank memes. But somehow, I got pulled into the show “Manifest” on Netflix, and wow, was it ever bad. 

The premise of the show is serviceable enough: a plane full of people on their way home from Jamaica to NYC lands 5.5 years after it takes off. None of the passengers feel like they lost any time, but their friends and families have assumed they were dead and gone. For the next 40 hours of television—which is supposed to be (and to the viewer very much feels like) 5.5 more years—a cast of no-name actors tries to figure out what the fuck happened. 

What develops is a sort of police procedural meets Lost meets Fringe meets 24 meets the 700 Club Christian propaganda, and it is a whole ass chaotic mess. 

The show is supposedly set in Queens: the lead character (Michaela Stone) and her on-again, off-again fiancé (Jared Vasquez) are both NYPD detectives who look nothing like any NYPD cop I’ve ever seen. And also somehow, none of the characters sound or act like they’re from anywhere within 5,000 miles of the five boroughs, and I would know, having grown up in one and lived in two others during the formative years of my life.

There are so many stupid and ridiculous things about this show it’s hard to know where to start, but let me try. 

For one thing, Jared and Michaela’s special love song is “More Than Words” by Extreme. All of the scientists trying to determine what happened to the plane are somehow both cancer researchers and geologists at the same time. The government is involved (natch), and one of the scientists kills a top CIA operative by inducing anaphylaxis with peanuts. BTW none of this is even relevant to the arc of the plot. 

Ever since the passengers returned from the “glow” as they come to call it, they see and hear “callings” that compel them to do things like rescue drowning surgeons and find kidnapping victims in storage units. Michaela’s brother, Ben, who was also on the plane with his son, Cal, is on a mission to save all the passengers from their “callings” and stop the imminent apocalypse.

In so doing, he retires to his basement where he makes a psychotic chart out of blue tack and string, concludes that “everything is connected”and befriends another high-level government operative who fakes his own death in Cuba. He tries to repair his marriage (his wife, Grace, has a sexy boyfriend now) and get to know his daughter, Olive, who used to be Cal’s twin but is now 5.5 years older.

All the while, the script writers keep having the characters tell you what’s happening because the plot would otherwise be indecipherable. For example, Michaela finds herself a new husband named Zeke in a cave who is suffering from frostbite and says something like “Zeke was resurrected from death just like the passengers were, and we are supposed to find each other! It’s all connected!”

In reality, the only thing that feels connected about this show is the writers’ room and a focus group which together somehow concluded that a mashup of every genre on television injected with not so subtle Christian proselytizing would somehow make for a successful television show.

Sadly for our society, they were right.