The Creators of THE OA Talk About the Show's Cancelation and Netflix's Offer For Them to Wrap Up the Story
I still get so mad and sad when I think of the series The OA, and how I never got to see how it would have ended. The show ran for two seasons and it told the most fascinating and beautiful story. Season 2 ended with a shocking twist, and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next, but Netflix canceled the series before we could ever see that conclusion.
In a recent interview with THR about their current Hulu series, A Murder at the End of the World, The OA creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij talked about the end of their first series, and how Netflix made them an offer they had to refuse. Batmanglij explained:
“The OA ending was unexpected to me, but they did try to get us to wrap it up with a movie and we said no. So I didn’t feel burnt because of that; I felt more puzzled. If you’re Netflix, why don’t you just finish it with more than just a wrap-up movie? Why don’t you finish it with a third season? It would force us to bring the three [remaining and planned] seasons into one and close it up, and then you could outsource it to Max or Hulu or wherever. You can do so much with it if it’s finished. This idea of all these unfinished homes littering their platform, I just don’t see the economics of it. It’s much better to have a finished thing and then license that thing and make money off that thing for the next 10-to-20 years.”
No freaking kidding! If there are fans of a series, and the creators are telling you they need a certain amount of episodes to finish telling the story, why not just give it to them? That show was so original and incredible. Netflix was lucky to have them, and it really was a slap in the face to offer them two hours to wrap up what was such an involved story. Marling went on to praise what they did accomplish with the time they had to tell part of The OA’s story, and the fanbase that was created because of it:
“The fan response to The OA was so huge and so heartening. One could be sad about it being ended prematurely, but that was so counterbalanced by this wave of love that came from people that wasn’t just a niche group. It was actually all over the world, and there’s still so much [fan] art-making. To this day, I’ll land at airports in strange parts of the world and people will do the movements. So it is hard to have feelings of bitterness. I actually feel really grateful to Netflix in the sense that we made something so wholly original and then they piped it into houses all over the world, like a fourth utility. Water, gas, electricity and Netflix. It had this incredible reach for a story that was really outside of the box, and I really think it’s a feat. So that was a window in time that happened in storytelling, in Los Angeles, and now we’re in a different window of time.”
That’s a really positive way to think about it without getting down about the premature ending. On to the next story. The first four episodes of A Murder at the End of the World are available to stream on Hulu now, with the final three episodes airing in the coming weeks on Tuesdays.