Outer Banks season 5 has arrived and ended the series on a rather conclusive note, indicating there won’t be a secret sixth season to bring things back and undo the series finale. However, Outer Banks, or rather the “Outer Banks Universe,” is not over, because this is how television works now.

Deadline reports that an old idea is now coming together into something more cohesive. Netflix is officially developing Kildare, a prequel series that will once again employ Outer Banks creators Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke to tell stories in the world. It had previously been mentioned as a possibility all the way back in 2023, but now in the wake of this 2026 finale, it appears Netflix agrees that it doesn’t want to let the series go in full. I can’t say I’m all that surprised, given that many other high-profile Netflix series have come to an end recently, and it wants to capitalize on past successes as much as it can.

Kildare would take place 20 years before the events of Outer Banks, meaning the existing crop of kids wouldn’t be born yet, and it would focus on some of their parents or new characters. Kildare is meant to dive into the social divide between Kooks and Pogues, something that was always a point of conflict in the series but was never explored in as much depth as an entire prequel series might. Here’s what Josh Pate told Deadline about its status:

“We’re working on the script,” Pate said. “We’re working hard on it with our awesome partners from Netflix, and we’re just trying to get all of it as good as it can be.”

“It really is the story of how the island split — and it’s particularly relevant in our country right now — how it split into the haves and have-nots, how the Kooks and the Pogues started. How did this rift start?”

So, the idea is to make it more socially relevant with the class divide as the main focus, but it stands to reason that the core of Outer Banks will likely be there as well, with action and treasure-hunting. Though in the case of, say, Big John Routledge, we already know quite a bit about his treasure-seeking past. We don’t know the exact ages of all the parents in the original show, but Routledge’s actor was around 40 when the show started to air, and 20 years before that, we could be in the late-teens to early-20s range, close to the current, now former cast.

If the creators are working on the script now, Kildare is likely years away from release. As an entirely new spinoff, however, something like a year or year-and-a-half break wouldn’t be expected. Now that Outer Banks itself is over, we’ll see what information we get on Kildare over time.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller seriesand The Earthborn Trilogy.