Netflix Developing Prequel to Popular Action Adventure Series

August 19, 2026

1

When a Netflix hit reaches the end of its run, the streamer tends to do one of two things: let it go quietly or look for a way back in. One of its longest-running young adult dramas finishes tomorrow after five seasons of treasure hunts, class warfare, and a character death that a lot of the fanbase still hasn’t forgiven, and the second option now looks a lot more likely.

Outer Banks arrived in April 2020, at the exact moment everyone was stuck indoors and desperate to see a beach, and it’s been one of Netflix’s most dependable performers ever since: Season 3 pulled close to 3.2 billion viewing minutes in its debut week, and Season 4 opened atop the streamer’s English-language chart with 15.5 million views. Season 5 arrives on Aug. 20, and the creators have spent three years hinting that Kildare Island has more story in it than the Pogues can carry.

Netflix

Deadline now reports that a prequel has entered formal development at Netflix, set roughly 20 years before the original series. Referred to as Kildare, it comes from all three Outer Banks co-creators, Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke, which removes the usual worry about a spinoff being handed to a new team. It would return to what powered Season 1 before the treasure hunts took over, aka the origins of the island’s split between the wealthy Kooks of Figure 8 and the working-class Pogues of The Cut.

The creators have said the prequel would mix new faces with the parents of characters we already know, which is where it gets interesting. Season 4 revealed that JJ wasn’t a Pogue by blood, but the son of Larissa Genrette, of one of Kildare’s wealthiest families, and Chandler Groff, who married into that money and spent two decades protecting his claim to it. Larissa died in a boating accident when JJ was a baby, placing that whole story pretty much exactly inside the prequel’s window. Sarah and Rafe’s parents are the other obvious candidates.

Jonas Pate has been talking about Kildare since 2023 and told Port City Daily in 2024 that he wanted to shoot in North Carolina with an all-new young cast. “We’re looking to film it in Wilmington,” he said at the time. Filming there would finally put the franchise in the state it has always been set in, after five seasons shot around Charleston.

Beyond that, there is very little to go on: no cast, no episode order, no named writers past the three creators, and no window. Formal development isn’t a green light, and the Pates have floated ideas before that took years to move. The Runarounds, their other Outer Banks-adjacent series, ended up at Prime Video rather than Netflix. Still, keeping the origins of the Kooks and the Pogues in-house looks like an easy call for a streamer losing its most reliable YA title tomorrow, to a fanbase that has spent six years arguing about that divide.