The 100 has been renewed for season 7, which might well be the series’ last.
Update (April 2019): One month after the rumor surfaced, The CW has officially renewed The 100 for season 7! There was no word today on whether it would be the show’s final season, as has been rumored.
The CW also renewed All American, In the Dark, and Roswell, New Mexico today.
“As we begin to plan for the 2019-20 season, we’re thrilled to have this roster of 14 exceptionally creative and distinctive series, including all five first-year shows, as the foundation on which to continue to build the multiplatform future of The CW,” said President of the CW, Mark Pedowitz in a statement.
“One of our key long-term goals has been to continually add more original programming all year round, especially in midseason and summer, and with these returning shows and the new series we’ll order as we get closer to the May upfront, next season on The CW is shaping up to be our most robust year-round schedule yet.”
Original story (March 2019): Looks like The 100‘s Book 2 will be more like a novella, if this morning’s update on the show’s fate from SpoilerTV is anything to go by.
SpoilerTV has found an update from Prod Week announcing that The 100 has been ‘quietly renewed’ for season 7, with production set to start in the summer.
The 100‘s renewal news, if true, should come as no surprise as The CW (very sympathetically) rarely cancels a long-running show without giving it a wrap-up season.
But as SpoilerTV notes, such an early renewal is usually sign of a final season order. This has not been confirmed and is merely speculation, but it is a reasonable assumption under the circumstances.
It would, after all, make a lot of sense for The CW to begin thinking about wrapping up The 100, if you look at its current slate trajectory. The network has been wrapping up a lot of its tentpole series lately, with Jane the Virgin, iZombie and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend ending this year and Arrow following with its eighth and final season this fall.
The 100, once a lone outlier in a sea of superhero shows, would end a very respectable seven-year run alongside its contemporaries, as it were, leaving The CW’s slate more open for new and recent buzz-worthy series (Roswell and Legacies have both been very well-received, and there are high hopes for the upcoming Batwoman and Nancy Drew).
Supernatural, of course, will never end, but otherwise The CW looks to once again be ushering in a new generation of series for a new generation of viewers. Most of them, we can’t help but notice, will be female-led.
Seven seasons is a very respectable run for any series, and narratively, it feels right that The 100 should end its run after finding and establishing a new society and way of being human on a new planet.
The 100 season 6, appropriately labeled “Book 2,” is reportedly very different from past seasons and will see the characters striving for peace rather than war. And with an endpoint in sight, peace might actually be possible.
The 100 has never been one to water out or compromise its vision, and having a set end date will allow the writers to narrow their focus and wrap everything up in a satisfying manner. As a longtime, devoted fan of the series, all I could ever hope for was a cohesive story from start to finish that never peters out or loses sight of its through-line.
This is and has always been an important story about humanity and the slow road to recognizing and acknowledging our recurring faults as a species. If The 100 ends with some form of establishment of a ‘better way’ for us, it will have done everything it set out to do.
And if it ends with some kind of emotional resolution for these characters and a reaffirmation of how important they are to each other, it’ll leave the fans and future binge-watchers satisfied, establishing the show as the cult sci-fi classic it always had the potential to become.
Of course, if The 100 season 7 is not in fact the end, I will continue to look forward to these beloved characters’ adventures and evolutions. Depending on how season 6 goes, ‘Book 2’ could certainly sustain the show for a couple more years, if the drive to continue telling this story is still there from the network and creatives involved. But whenever and however it ends, the journey will have been worth it.
Note: While we would like to wait for an official announcement, we’re not actually sure when/if one might be coming, and this update seems reasonable enough to report as a rumor, allowing fans to weigh in with their thoughts and feelings about The 100‘s potential renewal and resolution.