Netflix is the undisputable titan of streaming. Squid Game generated 1.65 billion hours of viewing in its first 91 days, a figure that no streaming title had ever reached. Stranger Things, which concluded its fifth and final season on New Year’s Eve 2025, crossed 1.2 billion total views across its entire run, becoming the platform’s most-watched English-language series. Wednesday and Bridgerton have similarly secured their positions as franchise cornerstones. However, Netflix has been equally consistent in terminating series before they can have a proper ending. For instance, 1899 was axed after a single season despite critical enthusiasm and a pre-planned three-season arc, while Santa Clarita Diet was cancelled after three seasons, leaving its cliffhanger finale permanently unresolved. Meanwhile, Sense8 required a vocal global fanbase and a public relations crisis just to secure a two-hour finale special. Among the biggest losses of Netflix’s cancellation streak is The OA.
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The OA‘s creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, structured the release around surprise, keeping plot details out of the press and dropping all episodes simultaneously. The series centers on Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), a young woman who resurfaces in her hometown after disappearing for seven years. She was blind before vanishing, but she returns with her sight restored and calls herself “The OA,” short for Original Angel. Rather than explain her absence to the FBI or her adoptive parents, she recruits a small group of locals, including high school students and a teacher, and begins recounting what happened to her in captivity. The show earned a 77% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its first season and established an immediately devoted audience, but its true creative ambitions were only beginning to surface.
The OA Was Untimely Cancelled
Part II of The OA, released on March 22, 2019, represented one of the most aggressive creative pivots in TV history. The first season had been contained to a single small town in Michigan, relying on intimate storytelling to build its mythology. The second season transplanted the entire narrative to San Francisco, introduced a parallel investigative thread following Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a private detective hired to find a missing teenager connected to a mysterious puzzle house. In addition, Prairie traveled to an entirely new dimension to reconnect with her fellow captives, while the group of five locals she left behind in Michigan embarked on a cross-country journey to support her from the other side.
The second season finale of The OA dissolved the boundary between fiction and reality, with the final scene placing Prairie in a dimension where she was, apparently, Brit Marling—an actress on the set of a television show called The OA, married to Jason Isaacs. Season 2 earned a 92% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a substantial leap from the first season’s score that underlined how the series was improving over time. Plus, since Marling and Batmanglij had conceived the series as a five-part story from the outset, fans were deeply invested in discovering what other surprises the show had in store for its audiences.
Sadly, Netflix cancelled The OA on August 5, 2019, roughly four months after Part II’s release. The platform never issued a detailed public explanation, but former VP of original content Cindy Holland stated that the production “had scope and ambition and was, by design, not the lowest-budget project around,” and that it “became clear that it was going to be unsustainable as an ongoing project in that form at Netflix at the time.” Actor Jason Isaacs later confirmed that the cancellation was driven by business factors rather than low viewership, explaining that the logic of streaming economics at Netflix was to avoid the escalating salary renegotiations that accompany long-running series. Netflix did offer Marling and Batmanglij a feature film to wrap up the story, but the co-creators declined because a single movie could not contain what they needed three full seasons to explore.
Can The OA Ever Return?
The fan response to The OA‘s cancellation was immediate, organized, and, by streaming-era standards, unprecedented in its intensity. The hashtag #SaveTheOA trended globally within hours of the announcement, and a Change.org petition gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Fans even crowdfunded a digital billboard in Times Square, while flash mobs performed the show’s central choreographic sequence, known as The Movements, in public spaces across multiple continents. One fan even staged a hunger strike outside Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters, which prompted Marling and Batmanglij to visit her in person and offer her food and water. In support of fans, prominent industry figures, including Shonda Rhimes, Sam Esmail, and Alex Kurtzman, publicly expressed their grief over the cancellation. The outcry did not move Netflix, and the series has remained in limbo ever since, available to stream on the platform but with no path to resolution.
The OA‘s cast and creators have refused to treat the cancellation as final. Marling and Batmanglij returned to television together in 2023 with A Murder at the End of the World, a miniseries for FX, which demonstrated that their creative partnership remained active. Co-star Brandon Perea told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that he has “a feeling it’s not over” and confirmed his willingness to return under any circumstances. In June 2025, Isaacs appeared on Jo Whiley’s BBC radio show and stated, “That story cannot end there. Zal, Brit, and I had dinner last week in Los Angeles, and there’s no chance for letting it go.” Then, at Fan Expo Denver in July 2025, Isaacs went further, telling a Collider panel that “they all have agreed that they’re desperate to come back and do it if we manage to do any more. Everybody, no matter how big a star they become in other things, they all want to do more of it.”
Marling’s position has been more measured. She told reporters that she has worked through the grief of the cancellation mentally, but has not closed the door, stating that a return remains possible under “the right conditions and circumstances.” Reports have also surfaced that other streaming platforms have approached the creative team about hosting a potential continuation, though Netflix retains the rights to the property. The specific character of those conversations has not been disclosed. Seven years after the cancellation, the most accurate assessment is that The OA is neither definitively dead nor credibly alive, suspended in a state that mirrors, with some irony, the near-death experiences at the heart of its own mythology.
The OA Seasons 1 and 2 are currently available to stream on Netflix.
Do you think a third season of The OA can still happen, or has too much time passed for the story to find its proper conclusion? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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