‘Outlander’: Here’s When Season 4 Will Finally Hit Netflix
Outlander fans are ones accustomed to waiting, even those who’ve only caught the series on Netflix. Given Starz’s unique content-sharing partnership with the streaming leader, some of its most popular originals have been able to find audiences well beyond their premium cable roots.
As we reach the end of 2020, only the first three out of five seasons of Outlander are available on Netflix. While Starz-subscribed fans agonize over the delays to season 6 brought on by the pandemic, others wait to hear when Season 4 will hit Netflix.
Well, there’s good news on that front now.
‘Outlander’ season 4 has a Netflix premiere date
Netflix tweeted out the good news for Outlander fans on Dec. 28. In the post, the streamer confirmed that season 4 would be available on Jan. 27, allowing a new portion of the show’s audience to continue the story.
Outlander season 4 originally premiered in November of 2018 on Starz and aired through 2019. The 13-episodes adapted Drums of Autumn, the fourth novel in the Diana Gabaldon-penned series that the show is based on.
Carrying on from season 3, the season finds Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) making their way in colonial-era North Carolina. Along the way, they stay at a plantation owned by a relative of Jamie’s and come into ownership of their own plot of land. Meanwhile, in the future, Brianna (Sophie Skelton) makes a startling discovery about her parents’ fate that will change the course of her life.
Season 6 of the series remains a long way out
The COVID-19 pandemic has screwed up the production of a lot of shows. Outlander, with its famously intimate sex scenes, is considered to be a particularly COVID-unfriendly work to produce.
As such, season 6 of the hit series has suffered a considerable delay with no real end in sight. Considering what fans expect from the show, it probably won’t be safe to continue work on it until well after a vaccine has been broadly distributed. As such, it might be well into 2022 before the series makes a return.
Fans need not worry about the prospect of cancellation, at least not yet. Starz renewed the series for season 6 at the same time that it ordered a fifth. Given that the show is by far one of the network’s most popular originals, it would take a substantial amount of bad luck for it to back out of further seasons.
Season 6 will adapt Gabaldon’s A Breath of Snow and Ashes. Published in 2005, the sixth book in the long-running series notably sees the Frasier clan grappling with the onset of the American Revolution, a historical event hinted at in the previous book.
Starz hasn’t officially renewed Outlander past season 6, but there are enough books to take the series to eight if the current rate of adaptation doesn’t accelerate or slow down. Gabaldon is currently at work on a ninth book, entitled Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone.
