Image via HBO
Published Nov 10, 2026, 11:00 AM EST
Lade Omotade is a News and Features Author at Collider, covering everything from casting announcements and streaming trends to behind-the-scenes stories and the cultural impact of today's biggest film and TV franchises. Since joining the team in 2024, she has written more than 1,000 news stories, with her work also cited by outlets like AOL and IMDb.
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One of Netflix's most-watched series of 2022 officially returns this week for its final season, bringing an end to a historically poignant drama that retells history a little too well. Often compared to HBO's acclaimed series, The Gilded Age, which returned for Season 4 this month, the Netflix gem centers on a compelling female protagonist as she strives for personal and political autonomy within traditional, male-dominated power structures.
Set in Austria and Germany, the series is inspired by the lives of Empress Elisabeth and Franz Joseph I of Austria. It premiered on Netflix on September 29, 2022, to highly positive reviews and, for two weeks, was the platform's second-most-watched series worldwide. The historical drama also ranked as the seventh most popular non-English series of 2022, with more than 150 million hours streamed. Later in 2023, it won Best Drama Series at the 51st International Emmy Awards. Season 1 currently has an 83% critics' score and an 85% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Created and co-written by Katharina Eyssen, The Empress returns this week, on November 12, 2026, for its third and final season, nearly two years after its renewal on January 27, 2025. Katharina Eyssen is back as showrunner, sharing creative responsibility with executive producer Robert Eyssen. Florian Cossen and Julia Langhof direct the new season, which is produced by Sommerhaus Serien GmbH, led by executive producers Jochen Laube and Fabian Maubach. Scarlett Lacey returns as executive producer, while Lars Gmehling serves as co-executive producer. Filming took place in Bavaria, the Czech Republic, and Spain.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
FIND YOUR ROMANCE →
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything. BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down. CNobody can know, including our closest friends. DOne look across a room and everything changes.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it. BWhose career comes first this year. CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public. DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
AI remember every single thing they have told me. BI show up to the things that matter to them. CI keep their secrets like they are my own. DI would give up something enormous for them.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment. BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match. CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet. DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight. BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end. CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches. DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
AA friendship I could never get back. BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid. CMy privacy. All of it would become public. DEverything. I would not think about it for long.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say. BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious. CFinally open about it, after years of being careful. DApart, and I still think about it constantly.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever. BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both. CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone. DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.
REVEAL MY ROMANCE →
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
- You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
- The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
- You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
- You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
- It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
- You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
- You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
- The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
- Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
- You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
- The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
- You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
What To Expect in 'The Empress' Season 3
As Netflix teased, The Empress Season 3 finds the royal marriage rockier than ever. After the devastating Sardinian War, Emperor Franz (Philip Froissant) returns home traumatized and haunted by the thousands of young men lost on the battlefield. Elisabeth (Devrim Lingnau) tries to stand by him and save their marriage while also doing what is right for the empire. Unfortunately, all her efforts are in vain.
Meanwhile, Franz's infidelity further deepens their rift in The EmpressSeason 3, while court resistance and her declining health force Elisabeth from Vienna to a distant island to recover. Coincidentally, the Empress meets the leader of the Hungarian revolution, Count Andrássy (Dejan Bućin), on her journey, and they feel an immediate intellectual and physical attraction. As for Franz's brother Maximilian (Johannes Nussbaum), he and his wife Marie (Josephine Thiesen) set off for Mexico, where he will ascend the imperial throne. In the end, Elisabeth must ultimately choose between following her heart and serving her people as Empress.
The Empress Season 3 premieres this week on Netflix.
Release Date September 29, 2022
