The OA
2016 American mystery drama television series

The OA is an American mystery drama television series with science fiction, supernatural, and fantasy elements. The OA debuted on Netflix on December 16, 2016. Created and executive-produced by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the series is their third collaboration. The series consists of two seasons of eight episodes each, nearly all directed by Batmanglij, and is produced by Plan B Entertainment and Anonymous Content. In the series, Marling stars as a young woman named Prairie Johnson, who has resurfaced after having been missing for seven years. Prairie now calls herself "the OA" and can see, despite having been blind before her disappearance.
On February 8, 2017, Netflix renewed the series for a second season, dubbed "Part II", that was released on March 22, 2019. Although The OA was planned by its creators to be a five-part story told in five seasons, on August 5, 2019, Netflix canceled the series after two seasons, leaving the show with a cliffhanger ending. The OA received generally favorable critical reception, averaging 77% for Part I and 92% for Part II on Rotten Tomatoes. It has been included in the "best of ..." lists of many entertainment publications.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The OA” as 2016 American mystery drama television series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19798744. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2017 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “The OA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.