The long-awaited second season of Netflix’s single best-reviewed series of all-time finally gets a release window, but there’s a crushing catch

Netflix releases an awful lot of TV shows, and while there’s been arguments raging for years as to which one can be designated as the streaming service’s single greatest ever, the numbers have placed Arcane as the clear winner.

The acclaimed video game adaptation – which also nabbed a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program – has racked up almost universal acclaim across every conceivable metric to cement itself as the single best-reviewed episodic original the platform has ever put out.

Disagree all you want – which is entirely fine and acceptable because everybody has different tastes – but a perfect 100 percent critical approval rating and 96 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, coupled with a 9.1 average on Metacritic and a 9/10 ranking on IMDb from over 241,000 votes is impossible to argue with.

Unsurprisingly, Arcane was renewed shortly after its first run of episodes dropped, and fans have been waiting on tenterhooks ever since for an update. It wasn’t too long ago that Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent hinted it wouldn’t be until 2024, and that’s proven to be true in the worst possible fashion after it was revealed at the Tencent Video V Vision Conference that season 2 won’t be landing until Q4 of next year.

That’s a three-year gap, which seems extreme even in the unruly world of streaming shows that take forever to return, but the real question now turns to whether or not it’ll be worth the wait. After all, it would be an understatement to say the bar has been set very high by the opening stretch, placing all of the pressure in the world on the creative team to ensure it lives up to those expectations come the winter of 2024.