The Untold Truth Of Manifest

Once a TV show grabs onto its central audience and manages to become a hit, it can be hard to imagine a time where it wasn't just assumed to always be a sensation. But every TV show has to start as just an untested concept getting sold to producers and executives. In that state, anything can look like a risky long shot. So it was with "Manifest," which series creator Jeff Rake came up with years before it first got on the air, while also dealing with lots of rejection as he tried to sell it.

"I landed this idea over a decade ago and, at that time, I always knew the end game," Rake told Collider about the origins of "Manifest." "When I originally hit on the concept, I knew the beginning. I knew that I wanted this to be about a separated family and throwing at them the most tantalizing, impossible obstacle conceivable, in order to tear them apart and bring them back together again ... Over the course of the years after I was unsuccessful in getting anyone to bite at the concept, it spent a few years on the shelf. And then, I would noodle with it, and give it more shelf time. And then, I would try to get a producer interested, and noodle with it." After all that "noodling" that helped to refine the premise, Rake was eventually able to get "Manifest" off the ground and the rest is history.