Recent reports have made fans start to question if New Amsterdam Season 6 will ever be released.
The hit NBC series (now streaming on Netflix in the US) aired for five successful seasons on the network, telling the story of the derelict New Amsterdam Medical Center and a staff (headed up by Ryan Eggold's Dr. Max Goodwin) hellbent on turning it around.
While reviews for the series have been less than stellar since the very beginning (the show sits at 34% on Rotten Tomatoes), viewership numbers were mostly strong, with two of its five seasons sitting around 10 million viewers per episode (per Deadline).
Will New Amsterdam Season 6 Ever Be Released?
As it stands, the odds are not looking good for a potential Season 6 of NBC's New Amsterdam.
The series seemingly completed its run with Season 5 back in January 2023, ending the medical drama after five years on air.
According to Deadline, the series was ultimately canceled due to dwindling ratings.
By the time the series ended, it was pulling roughly half the audience it was for its first couple of seasons. Season 5 averaged a dismal 5.16 million viewers across its 13 episodes (per The Hollywood Reporter), compared to the 10.65 million of Season 1 (per Deadline).
Speaking on the (possibly premature) cancellation of the series, creator David Schulner and director/executive producer Peter Horton told Deadline they thought the show "should have run for another couple years" and that it was "a bit of a mystery as to why it was canceled:"
Deadline: "Do you feel like you had plenty of time to end this exactly the way you wanted?"
Horton: "I don’t. I still think this thing could have, should have run for another couple years. There are still so many stories to tell and these characters are so interesting. David came up with just a raft of amazing characters and I want to know more about all of them. We’re No. 3 on Netflix right now. I don’t think the audience is ready for it to end, either."
Schulner: "And we’re still tied for number one in our time slot."
Horton: "It’s a bit of a mystery as to why it was canceled, to tell you the truth."
Despite these sentiments from New Amsterdam's creative brain trust, it seems highly unlikely the show will ever be heard from again.
Season 5 made such an effort to satisfyingly wrap up most of its narrative threads, that coming back almost would be a disservice to the ending the series ultimately got.
How Did New Amsterdam Season 5 End?
One of the biggest reasons New Amsterdam Season 6 would not make sense is because the series' central main character is no longer even on the same continent as the rest of the cast by the time the show ended.
The Season 5/series finale saw Ryan Eggold's Dr. Max Goodwin leave New Amsterdam after helping rejuvenate the once-out-of-mind New York medical facility for a job at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
Of course, this meant him breaking things off with Sandra Mae Frank's Dr. Elizabeth Wilder (despite leaving the door open for a romantic reconnection in the future) who would be named the hospital's next medical director.
The series finale also jumped decades into the future, introducing an adult version of Max's daughter Luna (who was only depicted as a child in the series up to that point) who would follow in her father's footsteps as this future timeline's head of New Amsterdam.
And other characters got endings with just as much a feeling of finality.
Dr. Floyd Reynolds (Jocko Sims) found love, Dr. Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine) and Dr. Martin McIntyre (Mike Doyle) finally got remarried, and Vanessa Bloom (Kathryn Prescott) and her sister Lauren (Janet Montgomery) finally reconciled their fledgling relationship.
While more stories in the New Amsterdam universe could always be a possibility, the Season 5/series finale did feel pretty fitting if it was, in fact, the end of this story.
New Amsterdam Seasons 1-5 are streaming now on Netflix.
