Why we should #SaveTheOA

Just smashed through the rest of Part 2 of The OA, such a brilliant TV show. It had me looking up ‘transference’, which led me down a Wikipedia warren to Freud’s views on homosexuality, Havelock Ellis, eugenics, the Nazis and eugenics, the US and eugenics (man, they were well into it before the Nazis came along), JH Kellogg, and a reminder of the greatest fact of all time - that Kellogg invented cornflakes to dampen people’s urge to masturbate.

It also had me googling Pyramus and Thisbe, which taught me about Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, previously unknown to me, and led me through how we ended up with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which I’d always thought was his story. All this from watching American fantasy drama The OA.

It also had me looking up liminal thinking, liminality, liminal beings – such as centaurs, ghosts and cyborgs – and the work of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner’s words offered me a new lens through which to view my ongoing depression, as this writer used it to view her grief: ‘Turner defined liminal individuals as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony”. But Turner gives hope by referring to “betwixt and between” through the concept of the “realm of pure possibility.”’

Rather than view my depression as something through which I’ll continue to wade for the rest of my life, I can view it as a threshold through which to pass, something betwixt and between what went before and what will come next.

You don’t get that from many TV dramas. But The OA is so well thought out, so thoroughly researched and structured, it offers up a real-life cultural puzzle to unpick that’s almost as compelling as the puzzle in the house that the characters are trying to solve. That Netflix have cancelled it is such a shame given that both the world it’s created and the storytellers behind it are just beginning to show their potential.

I hope there is some way we will get to see Part 3 of The OA, and hopefully much more. I hope that the obvious love on social media for the show will cause Netflix to rethink their decision. Shows like this don’t come along very often. Please don’t leave us betwixt and between.