Watch the First 'Outer Banks' Season 3 Teaser

Photo credit: JACKSON LEE DAVIS/NETFLIX
Photo credit: JACKSON LEE DAVIS/NETFLIX

The second season of Netflix's Outer Banks dropped in July 2021, following a tight-knit group of working class teenagers in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, as they engage in a thrilling treasure hunt for $400 million worth of gold. Fans have loved this take on the classic Netflix teen thriller, and it appears that a new season is on the horizon.

The streamer announced the show's renewal last December, confirming that the Pogues will continue their adventures. Season 2 went even bigger than the first, with more explosions, an alligator fight, and a brand-new Pogue. The season also ends epic twist to go along with the finale cliffhanger, which finds the Pogues stranded on yet another island.

Here’s everything we’ve uncovered about Season 3 while we wait for it to drop.

Outer Banks Season 3 will premiere in 2023.

Netflix dropped the first teaser for the forthcoming season as part of its annual fan event, Tudum. The action-packed clip (seen above) shows the Pogues briefly enjoying the abandoned island which they've dubbed "Poguelandia," before a montage shows them running away from wild dogs and participating in car chases as they continue to search for treasure.

The video also teases some fight scenes against bad guys Ward and Rafe, as well as the returns of Cleo (Carlacia Grant) and John B.’s resurrected-from-the-dead father, Big John Rutledge (Charles Halford).

The main cast is likely to return.

All of the Pogues make it out of Season 2 alive, washed up on an unknown island, so it's very likely that Madelyn Cline (Sarah), Chase Stokes (John B.), Madison Bailey (Kiara), Jonathan Daviss (Pope), and Rudy Pankow (J.J.) will all be back in Season 3. We can also expect to see more of Carlacia Grant, who was promoted to series regular as the newest Pogue, Cleo. The actors who portray the show's Big Bads, Charles Esten (Ward) and Drew Starkey (Rafe) are also likely to return.

Season 3 would continue the treasure hunt.

Heavy spoilers for the Season 2 finale.

The Season 2 finale ends on a low note for the Pogues, who are stranded on Poguelandia after losing a fortune for a second time. Even though they're down, showrunners Jonas Pate, Josh Pate, and Shannon Burke told Entertainment Weekly that they're not going to give up on the gold. The creative team also hinted that the show will go deeper into the backstory around the gold, using more historical inspiration.

"[The treasure] has to become a bigger mystery across the series. And so the treasure hunt is going to expand, and the mythology around the treasure hunt is going to evolve and get deeper. We're pretty fired up about how that mythology is going to expand in season 3. We've been reading a lot of books, and we got some good things to hang it on," Josh Pate told EW.

Season 3 would also deal heavily with the huge twist of the Season 2 finale, that John B.'s father Big John is actually alive. The showrunners told EW that the reveal and its impact on John B. will be "maybe the spine" of the season. "John B.'s relationship with his dad is a huge theme and having his dad back around and eventually they're going to meet back up and John B. has to reconcile his idealized version of his dead dad with the reality of his alive dad. It gives us a lot of thematic father-son stuff to work with," Pate said.

Other characters will get the spotlight in later seasons.

Season 2 of Outer Banks widened the story from its focus on John B. and Sarah. As the couple were stuck on their own in the Bahamas, the story jumped between them and the rest of the Pogues in the OBX. Pope ended up getting a much larger part in the series, as we got to know his family life and learned that he's a descendent of Denmark Tanney, the man whose treasure they've been hunting.

Josh Pate told Decider that the decision to focus on Pope happened early in the writing process for Season 2. He also shared the creative team's plan to give every character their own major, season-long story if the show keeps going.

"We can't shine a light on everybody all the time, that's just not in our bandwidth. We knew this was going to be a Pope-heavy season. And hopefully, if we keep going, they'll be other characters who kind of get the spotlight to come forward if we get future seasons," Pate said.

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