Show caption Not you average kind of heroine: Brit Marling as Prairie in The OA. Photograph: JoJo Whilden/Netflix Television Farewell, telepathic octopus! Netflix has killed off The OA, and it’s a travesty Brit Marling’s drama was one of the most thrillingly strange shows on TV. Now it has been cancelled without getting the chance to finish its ambitious story Scott Bryan Fri 9 Aug 2019 10.00 BST Share on Facebook

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We have become used to the endless avalanche of announcements of new shows by Netflix, but recently it’s the deluge of cancellations that has stopped us in our tracks. Designated Survivor and Santa Clara Diet are gone. Tuca & Bertie, despite receiving much acclaim, has also been given the chop.

Now The OA has been added to the list. The OA! One of the most interesting and thought-provoking shows on television. It may never have felt destined for a mainstream audience, but ask anyone else who got into it like I did and they will tell you that the mystery sci-fi drama created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij changed the game in what you thought was possible on television.

Partly it was because of just how far the plot was willing to stretch itself. The premise, for those unfamiliar with the show, concerned a young woman, Prairie (Brit Marling), reappearing in her home town seven years after she disappeared. The first twist? She was now able to see having been blind before. The second? That she was adopted by her American midwest parents and was really from Moscow, the daughter of a Russian oligarch. Most shows would have been tempted to have unpeeled these details over the course of half a season. The OA did that in the first episode, which felt as if it was 15 minutes. And, what’s more, those developments were almost bland compared with the twists that were to come.

Yet, for all its desire to jolt viewers, The OA never once jumped the shark. Not even with a twist that involved a telepathic killer octopus. Then there was the cliffhanger of season two, not just one of the best cliffhangers of any show on Netflix, but probably of all time. It was so ridiculous, so dramatic, so bizarre, so meta, that at first you assumed they wrote it in a panic and went: “Screw it.” It was only after you shouted at the screen, or texted half your mates in ALL CAPS, that you realised that, heck, it actually worked. In fact, it set up a potentially wild third season, piling more possibilities on to what always felt like a limitless show. But now we won’t have a conclusion.

Let me out … Now we’ll never know what was going to happen. Photograph: Nicola Goode/Netflix

This OA was more than just shocks and ludicrousness. It had real depth, on a level that was unexpectedly spiritual. With much of the plot dealing with themes of the afterlife and personal choice, it pushed viewers to think about the bigger questions: can we change the course of history? Are our lives meaningless or part of some divine plan? Adding to this philosophical strand were dream sequences, opening up a heaven so far removed from our own reality that you wondered, heck even hoped, that such a place could exist.

Some might hope that another television network will pick up The OA, as NBC did when it rescued Brooklyn-Nine-Nine. But it is unclear where else the show would fit. What made it exceptional was how it was perfectly built for Netflix. Opening titles? Nah. Instead of once each episode, they showed them once in the 56th minute of the first and then not again for an entire season, perhaps recognising that some of us might binge the whole lot in one go. A similarly unorthodox approach was taken to the episode lengths – the longest episode was 71 minutes, the shortest 43, the length fitting around the story being told rather than the other way round. Traditional television would stifle this sort of approach.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear The OA is going going to find any new home. In a statement released on Instagram, Marling expressed her disappointment that she and Batmanglij “cannot finish this story”.

When I interviewed Jason Issacs, one of the show’s stars, he praised the pair’s vision: “These guys are artists,” he said. “They wanted to make something that is rich and layered, and also they have got five seasons in their head and [season two] needs to fit this labyrinthine puzzle they have already laid out for themselves.” While the appeal of The OA was how it often asked more questions than it answers, it is a shame that, with just two seasons having been made, we won’t be able to crack that puzzle at all.

