Speaking of young actresses, or rather actors - the kid who plays Buck is television’s first transgender Asian. Woohoo!
That kid from The Night Of (the FBI agent in this show) is great. He should be in everything, just being calm. He should try to calm down Mr. Robot.
I thought it was ok. I didn’t get too deeply invested in to it. I expected it to suck (I lived through Lost, man!) I thought Stranger Things was good too, more fun than this. But this was at least a good story. Felt like an 8-hour movie.
I don’t feel that the ending was conclusive at all.
I also find it shady that:
Steve was carted away and his teacher paid for him to not have to go, they all get caught in the house together yada yada he is back in school like nothing happened. He still did break some kid’s throat and his dad still was pissed at him and the teacher had no legal right to pay for his escape. I am having a hard time believing that he is just in school again.
Yes, that was the unbelievable part of the story for me haha
I, too, interrupted Luke Cage to come over to The OA. I was excited to finally start Luke, and I enjoyed it at first but he seems to be walking around cringing in pain for 6 episodes now and I’m a bit over it.
I guess I’ll see what’s going on in the land of *Narcos *next.
I have to admit, viewing clips of the big dance sequence at the end does have kind of a hypnotic, so-bad-it’s-good appeal. But I’m glad I didn’t bother wading through eight episodes for the privilege.
Yes, cosigned. I’m actually fascinated that anyone *didn’t *bust out laughing (or cover their eyes in embarrassment) at the weirdo “movements”. My reaction to that was “how did no one on the set tell them ‘NONONO, you cannot put this on TV screens, ABORT ABORT’?”. Even most of the critics I’ve read who liked the show admit that aspect was cringeworthy. But there is a solid contingent of people online (not just here but the IMDB boards) who didn’t flinch at all. And I think that’s the outlook of the creative people making it as well: they didn’t even consider that it might look absurd to most people. Interesting.
OTOH there were aspects of this that were really interesting: particularly anything to do with Hap. The scene with him and the other “evil scientist” at the hospital was especially gripping, and the way he set up his basement holding cells was ingenious and not anything I’ve seen before.
Yeah, this show was weird. I’m sure there are lots of shows filled with stupid woo that just never come up on my radar because they’re obviously terrible in every way. But this wasn’t terrible in every way. Production values and performances were good. The writing and story structure wasn’t bad. It was for the most part engaging and the product of competent craftsmanship. But … jeez.
I’m guessing the show runner really believes in this nonsense and was excited to get the funding to run with their ideas. It feels like a side effect of the current Netflix / Amazon model of producing a bunch of really esoteric work that might not have found a home elsewhere. So they still insist on high budget quality creations, but are more willing to tolerate zany ideas. As a consumer it’s worked out alright and I think I’ve been exposed to some interesting greatness that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I guess the price to pay is the occasional miss like OA. And from the Netflix / Amazon perspective it isn’t even a miss: lots of people seem to like it.
Well, aren’t the moves supposed to look ridiculous, to us? I think that was kind of the point, in the end. If they hadn’t looked so ridiculous, would the shooter in the school have been distracted enough to let the security guard tackle him?
I guess it depends on what you believe the purpose of those movements are. If they are actually supposed to open some kind of portal, then yes it seems unnecessarily over-the-top. But if the actual purpose of the movements was to distract the shooter, then it makes sense for them to be so weird and crazy. Maybe that was the real motivation of whatever otherwordly ‘force’ revealed the moves to Prairie.
This is another really interesting question. I’ve seen a number of people on IMDB and the AV Club argue exactly this. But there are too many people who disagree strenuously and don’t think they look ridiculous at all (people who have a high tolerance for woo or what the NYT called “New Age woolgathering”). And I just don’t get the sense from how they were presented that the makers of the show saw them as preposterous. I think **Driver8 **just upthread is right:
Driver, that whole post is spot on, in fact–perfectly said. It’s very strange for a show to have naturalistic, well-filmed and acted scenes like the one in the hospital morgue, or the ones in Cuba (as long as you ignore some of the logistic problems), but then also prominently feature this risible woo (not just the “movements” but the scenes where OA is communing with the vaguely Eastern karma lady).
The traditional TV production system would have kept some of that from getting through the pipeline, and part of me has an instinctual desire for some of those filters to be put back in place. But I absolutely take your point, which reminds me of the one Dan Fienberg (one of my favorite critics, currently at The Hollywood Reporter) made in his review:
Note that Fienberg too interprets the tone as “utter earnestness”. If they are subtly aiming more for ironic distance, it utterly whooshed him, me, and Driver8. But I just don’t believe that interpretation is defensible.
One more point to make about whether it can be counted as a commercial success for Netflix. Since their business is all about adding and retaining subscribers and thus getting the maximum number of monthly fees, whether people watch any individual show isn’t so much the point. Oddly enough, they have determined that the key element for any individual piece of content that correlates with retention of subscribers is whether someone adds it to what I call a “queue” but is now called “My List”. If people have something on their queue that they are interested in watching at some point in the future, they are less likely to cancel their subscription. If OTOH someone finishes something, it’s not so much use to Netflix because even if the subscriber loved it, they aren’t going to keep their subscription simply out of gratitude. “What have you done for me lately?” is the overriding rule.
Makes total sense. But it’s kind of troubling in a way. Do absurd elements introduced late in a show’s run (and not included in the marketing) even matter? Maybe they do, because they could lead people to get frustrated and say “Netflix gets me interested in these things and then they always jump the shark” (this was certainly true IMO for their first big piece of original IP: House of Cards). IDK, just musing out loud here.
I see your point but I’m not too concerned about that. They do have a vested interest in not frustrating people and I don’t think they’re incentivized in any way to spring the absurd elements on unsuspecting viewers. There is a higher risk of it happening with their “zany ideas” model but the older broadcast model IMHO has an even worse tendency to spring awfulness on viewers by trying to milk shows for far too long. If I have to pick my poison I’ll pick the Netflix model. At least it’s a quick death
Do you know for a fact that “My List” is their main guide? Interesting if so. I’m happy to keep my subscription largely on the basis of them having interesting shows continuously coming out, but I don’t use that feature. Perhaps I’m atypical.
I’m speculating as an outsider, but I assume Netflix uses their incredibly detailed viewer statistics to great effect. I assume not only do they know what people watch, but when they pause or rewatch or how quickly they watch. It must make the Nielsen ratings look like a My First Data Science Statistics Fisher Price toy. Ordinarily this sort of thing would creep me out but I actually think there is a chance that my interests as a consumer and Netflix’s interests might align here. They can broaden their subscription base not just by the lowest common denominator approach I associate with the traditional broadcasters but also with targeted and interesting niche productions. So they’ll always have a few things that keep me subscribed, and that is true for a bunch of different kinds of consumers. It doesn’t even have to be a lot of things per user since subscription costs are relatively low.
I hope this model is sustainable. I’m not sure. It involves producing a lot of things. Ideally this all settles into a sustainable pattern that looks similar to what we have now. But it strikes me as possible that it isn’t sustainable and the streaming companies are only engaged in it temporarily for fast growth and we will see a return to something more traditional. That would suck.
By like you, I’m just musing out loud. I’m not an expert by any means.
Finished it last night, and my first thought was to quote Michael from Arrested Development: “I don’t know what I expected.”
I mean, sure, I binged it, but the ending didn’t really pay off that binge… and I’m not sure what payoff would’ve worked.
So if the Hap and Homer story was completely made up, what are we to do with the scene where Hap goes to meet his fellow NDE researcher and has to kill him? OA wasn’t there, so if she made it all up then not only would that scene have been entirely conjecture, she wouldn’t have even had a logical excuse to tell the gang about it.
I did find it fairly amusing that at one point some of the characters were watching TV, and I’m pretty certain they were watching the first episode of Stranger Things.
What would have worked was some more tangible evidence that it wasn’t all her nutso imagining. At least for me. The ending was such a tremendous let down for the hours and hours that preceded it.
What was with her telling them all to leave their doors open anyway?
Prairie said something about it showing that they are opening their lives to her. If you look at Prairie as being a manipulator and even an aspiring cult leader, little meaningless things like that are a way of establishing control over someone.
Yes, that is the same question I always ask the “she made it up” crowd at IMDb. That’s a great scene, probably my favorite of the series, but it just doesn’t square with her telling a BS story. (Nor, of course, does the ending where she instantly goes from relaxing in the bath to sitting bolt upright, scrambling to get clothes on and running out the door to arrive at the school just as a Columbine-style shooter does. That’s just not remotely plausible as pure coincidence.)
I don’t think OA had ever seen the kids’ school cafeteria, but if you rewatch it’s clearly in her dream. They show the trees through the windows and it’s exactly the same. Then she wakes up with a bloody nose and runs straight to the cafeteria.
So it is two stories, if you will. The real story of the kids meeting, learning to dance, and saving the day. And the “made-up” story of Hap.
The Hap part was intriguing to me, the kids part not as much. It was obvious enough from early on that they might end on “she made it all up”, so I didn’t necessarily feel burned, but still let down. They could have made a better show by embracing the world she created.
Like the review quoted … I walk away mainly pleased that Netflix is making stuff like The OA.
Glad I watched it, but deeply flawed in its editing and storytelling IMO. There were several pointless sub-threads in the story, like the FBI guy, and the pointless fleeing to the hotel and later returning. There also was never a clear distinction between Prairie’s recollections vs actual 3rd-person perspective events communicated to us as a viewing audience…Hap in the morgue being a particular example…which I feel is just sloppy writers jerking the viewers around in a poor “Ha ha, made you think” attempt at plot-twist drama.
In retrospect, my perspective is that the story illustrates the susceptibility of flawed, troubled, lonely, isolated personalities to be enamored with and unquestioningly accept the presence of a powerful personality and vision…a cautionary tale on the development of cults and woo-acceptance. I don’t think that was necessarily the writer’s intent though.
OA felt like the other two shows to me. John From Cincinnati for the new-agey angels not-quite-pulling-it-off vibe. Lost for the “this is gonna be all for nothing, isn’t it?” vibe.
