THE OA creators talk about the show’s cancellation and Netflix’s offer to wrap up the story

I still get so angry and sad when I think about the series The OA, and how I could never see how it would end. The show lasted two seasons and told the most fascinating and beautiful story. Season 2 ended with a shocking twist and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next, but Netflix canceled the series before we got to see that conclusion.

In a recent interview with THR about their current Hulu series, A murder at the end of the worldThe creators of OA Brit Marling AND Zal Batmanglij they talked about the end of their first series and how Netflix made them an offer that they had to refuse. Batmanglij explained:

“The ending of OA was unexpected for me, but they tried to convince us to end it with a movie and we said no. So I didn’t feel burned by it; I felt more perplexed. If you’re Netflix, why don’t you end it all with something more than just a final film? Why don’t you end it with a third season? It would force us to bring the three [remaining and planned] seasons into one and close it, and then you could outsource it to Max or Hulu or wherever. You can do a lot if it’s finished. This idea of ​​all these unfinished houses cluttering up their platform, I just don’t see the economics of it. It’s much better to have a finished thing and then license it and make money from it for the next 10-20 years.

I am not joking! If you have fans of a series and the creators tell you they need a certain number of episodes to finish telling the story, why not give it to them? That show was so original and incredible. Netflix was lucky to have them, and it was truly a slap in the face to give them two hours to wrap up that complex story. Marling went on to praise what they accomplished with the time they had to tell some of The OA’s story and the fan base that was created because of it:

“The fan response to The OA has been enormous and encouraging. You might be sad that it ended prematurely, but that was outweighed by this wave of love coming from people who weren’t just a niche group. It was actually all over the world, and there’s still so much of it [fan] make art. To this day I will land in airports in strange parts of the world and people will go through the motions. So it’s hard to have feelings of bitterness. I actually feel really grateful to Netflix in the sense that we made something so totally original and then they released it into homes all over the world, like a fourth utility. Water, gas, electricity and Netflix. It had incredible scope for a truly outside-the-box story, and I really think that’s a feat. So that was a time window that occurred in the narrative, in Los Angeles, and now we’re in a different time window.

It’s a really positive way to think about it without getting depressed about the premature ending. Until the next story. The first four episodes of A murder at the end of the world are now available to stream on Hulu, with the final three episodes airing on Tuesdays over the next few weeks.