TV Rewind: It’s a Miracle The OA Was Ever Allowed To Exist at All

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Four years after Netflix’s The OA was unceremoniously canceled after two seasons (following arguably the most meta finale ever), I’m still caught between half-expecting it to return, and half-believing it was all a dream. Such was The OA‘s magic, which earnestly beseeched both its characters and its audience to believe impossible things. It must have worked on Netflix, too, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why the short-lived series was allowed to exist at all. Maybe, for a time, the powers-that-be were just as enthralled with co-creators Brit Marling (who also starred as the titular “Original Angel,” or OA) and Zal Batmanglij’s bizarre appeal to faith, imagination, and the power of artistic expression as the OA’s devoted acolytes. 

Now with Marling and Batmanglij returning to television with their new series, A Murder at the End of the World, the beautiful anomaly that was The OA, and how surprising it is that it ever existed at all, is top of mind. 

From the jump, The OA felt like an underdog. That the trailer appeared out of nowhere less than a week before the show premiered—dropping onto YouTube December 12, 2016, four days before release—wasn’t exactly unusual, but hardly seemed to bode well for the series’ success. And that dollop of marketing didn’t even give a very clear indication of what the show would be about. It seemed to promise a story about a woman who disappeared as a child and returned years later, now with her vision restored after previously being blind. But otherwise, it was hard to tell what to expect. Was it sci-fi? Family drama? A poignant exploration of trauma and recovery? 

Then the show hit Netflix, and it quickly became clear that it was all of the above, and also unlike anything we had ever seen. From the very first episode, The OA defied expectations, taking nearly an hour to get around to the opening credits (after taking a hard pivot into a backstory literally no one, including the characters on the screen, saw coming) and keeping us on our toes for everything that followed. 

Part-abduction thriller, part-supernatural fantasy, part-cerebral sci-fi, and part, um, heartwarming cult origin story(?), The OA follows Marling’s protagonist, who was abducted as a blind young woman named Prairie Johnson, and returns seven years later as a sighted oracle who calls herself “the OA.” In the first episode, she recruits a group of four high school students and one lonely teacher to join her in an abandoned construction site, where she spends each evening telling them her mind-boggling life story, including how she spent the past seven years held prisoner by the villainous Hap (Jason Isaacs), who subjected her and her fellow prisoners to repeated near-death experiences in the hopes of discovering a portal to another dimension. 

And that’s where the show gets truly weird: the OA believes Hap’s experiments worked. She thinks she has learned how to access another dimension, and that she can use it to rescue the others, who are still trapped in Hap’s basement dungeon. But she’s going to need some help, which is where her five new acolytes come in. Because the key to opening the portal relies on all of them performing “The Movements,” a sequence of divinely choreographed dance moves, in perfect unison and with utter sincerity. When executed correctly, The Movements have the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, and even send the performers to another dimension.

Yes, The OA argues that the secret to unlocking ultimate, cosmic power is dance. But just wait, it gets stranger. By the end of the second season—which brings in a secret alt-universe dream lab, a psychic octopus, puzzle houses, and dancing robots—viewers had followed the show through so many twists and turns that The Movements felt almost old hat. And by the close of the finale, which broke the fourth wall so thoroughly it may as well have been vaporized, it was easy to believe in impossible things. 

Spoilers, I guess, except I’m not sure it’s possible to spoil the experience of The OA with just a few sentences. Kind of like a roller coaster, it’s one thing to talk about The OA, but another thing entirely to climb aboard. Maybe that’s why Netflix signed on in the first place. Maybe they thought they knew what they were getting into after viewing Marling’s previous writing projects, including the films Sound of My Voice, Another Earth, and The East. After all, they too explored themes of alternate realities, the power (for better or worse) of groupthink, and the nature of belief. It would have been reasonable to assume that The OA might be along the same lines. And it was, at first. At least a little bit. At least for a while.

In hindsight, it boggles the mind that we got even one season of this genre-defying, mind-bending, defiantly optimistic show, let alone two, once it became clear what it was. 

As I put the finishing touches on this article, news just broke that the SAG-AFTRA strike may finally be at an end after months of actors and industry workers demanding a fair deal from studios. Much like the Writers Guild strike, which ended just a little over a month before this one, the crux of the unions’ argument was that the art they create is valuable, and should be treated as such. Humans are to art as hydrogen is to water; take out the former, and suddenly the latter has no substance. 

And that was the point of The OA, or at least one of the points (I could never hope to tease out all of them). At its core, it was a show about people who believed they could change the world through artistic expression. That belief gave them the strength to endure all manner of horrors: the stripping away of their rights, their autonomy, their freedom, their very identities. It gave them something to hold onto through loneliness and ostracization, through abuse and failure, through terror and persecution and even death. 

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about The OA, at least for those who would seek to commodify and dehumanize art, is that it never claims that art makes anyone’s life easier. If anything, most of its characters struggle more after coming in contact with the titular Angel. Her story and The Movements are never touted as a cure for the world’s ills in and of themselves, although there is power in both. People still make horrible decisions, still wound one another, still suffer, still die. 

But the OA’s story gives them something they never had before: each other. When the characters of The OA learn The Movements, they don’t learn them alone. They meet as individuals, but through story, through dance, through art, they become a community. And once that bond has been formed, they are stronger together than they ever were apart. 

Art may not make life easier. But it does make it better. 

Would The OA have even been made today, in a climate where the very nature of art is up for debate? In a world where we have boiled artistic expression down to “content” and talk about its consumption like TV dinners, and argue over whether humans are really necessary in its creation at all? 

I suspect, if Marling and Batmanglij had been given the opportunity to finish what they started (the show was originally planned to last five seasons), The OA may have explored those ideas. The Season 2 finale definitely seemed to set up a storyline in which the word “content” could have been bandied about quite a bit. 

I’m sure Marling and Batmanglij have some thoughts on the matter. I wish we could have seen them play out. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been in a way any of us expected; after all, whomst among us had “cosmic octopus” on their “OA Season 2″ bingo card? 

But rather than being bitter that we’ll never see the last three seasons of The OA (believe me, I have already invested quite a bit of time in that), I choose to be grateful that we got any of it at all. Much like the haunted puzzle house, or Hap’s basement lair, or the octopus (I will never get over the octopus), The OA never felt like something that should exist. It was too unconventional, too ambitious, too hard to pitch and easy to dismiss. But above all, it was too hopeful, not in happy endings—plenty of stories have those—but in us, in our ability to believe and create and work together to be greater than the sum of our parts. It believed storytelling and artistic expression were the most powerful things in the world, powerful enough to unite us, powerful enough to create the change we want to see, powerful enough to alter the very fabric of the reality we inhabit. 

We may never see the final three seasons of The OA. But I think it still accomplished what it set out to do. It got us to believe in impossible things. 

And as we learned from The OA, once we believe in impossible things, nothing is impossible. 

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Lauren Thoman is a Nashville-based freelance pop culture writer whose writing has appeared in numerous online outlets including Parade, Vulture, and Collider. She is also the author of the novel I’ll Stop the World. Find her at her website, or on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. 

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