The Empress Ends on November 12, and Netflix's Sisi Is Getting the Final Season It Earned

Photo: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Netflix has confirmed November 12 for the third season of The Empress, and it is the last. The German series about Elisabeth of Austria, the Sisi everyone in Vienna still sells on fridge magnets, arrived in 2022 and became one of Netflix's biggest non-English shows without most people in the US noticing. Season two came in November 2024, and it has taken nearly two years to get the ending.

Photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Devrim Lingnau plays Elisabeth and Philip Froissant is Franz Joseph, and the show's trick from the start was to treat a very familiar nineteenth-century story as something close to a political thriller. The court is a snake pit, the mother-in-law is the real power, and Elisabeth is the one person in the palace who does not understand the rules and will not learn them. Season two ended with the empire wobbling and the marriage in a worse state.

Photo: Superbass, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A final season means they can actually use the history. The real Elisabeth spent decades travelling to get away from Vienna, lost a child, lost her son Rudolf at Mayerling, and was murdered in Geneva in 1898 by an anarchist with a sharpened file. The show has been running well ahead of that, so I do not expect it to reach the end of her life, but it has to pick which of those tragedies it wants to close on.

Photo: Franz Xaver Winterhalter, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I have a soft spot for this series because it looks expensive and cares about costumes and never gets silly. The Crown comparison is obvious and the show has mostly lived up to it on a fraction of the budget. Lingnau in particular has been doing quietly great work that would get award attention if the show were in English.

Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you have not started, three seasons is a manageable commitment and the first one is the best. Have you watched The Empress, or has it been sitting in your list under the Bridgerton recommendations?