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A few years ago, Zal Batmanglij read something that terrified him. He's pretty sure it was in the lit magazine n+1 (the memory is a bit fuzzy), and while the words themselves weren’t alarming, their origin was: They’d been written with the help of artificial intelligence. Today, that’s not surprising—whole novellas are getting headlines for being (at least partially) AI-generated—but in those pre-2023 days, it took his breath away: “That short story really scared me.”
If you recognize Batmanglij’s name, it’s likely because he’s half of the team that created The OA, a mind-fuck of a show known for its highly dedicated fan base and the fact that it was unceremoniously canceled by Netflix after just two seasons, even though he and cocreator Brit Marling had planned five. On Tuesday, the pair debut their new series, A Murder at the End of the World, via FX on Hulu.
In it, a hacker named Darby (Emma Corrin) joins up with another internet forum sleuth, Bill (Harris Dickinson), to investigate the deaths of multiple women. After Darby writes a book about their quest, she gets invited to a tech genius’s retreat in Iceland to meet other thought leader types. It’s also a mind-fuck, one with a Muskian rich guy (played expertly by Clive Owen) at the center and more than a few things to say about capitalism and climate change. It also has some points to make about the impact of algorithms on human existence.
Bear in mind, this is my interpretation, not theirs. Though Marling and Batmanglij don’t call me ridiculous when I point out they made a tech-skeptical show after their previous series was canceled by a streaming giant, they do counter that they're not in the Tech Is Bad camp. (They also warn me that revealing too much about the plot will tip off their super-sleuth fans, so the synopsis above is all I’ll give to back my point.) The problem, Marling says, is that many rapid tech advances are happening in a system that cares only about profits, not ramifications.
“That starts to create a system in which we really become guinea pigs, everything’s being siphoned out of us,” Marling says. “As a force multiplier for capitalism, tech scares me. If we were in a different system and our values were different, I would be really psyched to see what comes after AI.”
Quotes like this serve as a reminder that Marling was an economics major. She met Batmanglij at Georgetown University after seeing a film that he’d made with director Mike Cahill. After graduating (she was valedictorian), she went to work for Goldman Sachs but didn’t stay long. She rejoined Cahill and Batmanglij and, in various incarnations, they’ve made several films, including Sound of My Voice, Another Earth, I Origins, and The East.
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Similar themes run through much of Batmanglij and Marling’s work: environmentalism, cults, mysteries. Frequently, there’s an element of science fiction; the movies often feel as though they’re made for philosophy students, rather than film ones. As such, they’ve attracted audiences who get jazzed by unspooling the complex ideas and puzzles they weave into each story. Cracking their code is a mark of intellectual pride. When The OA got canceled three seasons short of offering acolytes any sense of conclusion, they were devastated. It still smarts.
The OA premiered on December 16, 2016, in that weird period after the election but before Donald Trump took the office of US president. Mandy Paris discovered it in the first semester of her second year of graduate school. She got sucked in. Back then, though, she wasn’t sure if she liked it, or just couldn’t look away. During the first season’s finale, a group of high school students do a dance—known as the Movements, or the Five Movements—to stop a school shooter. At the time, critics called it “problematic, disrespectful, and a perfect example of bad television.” Paris says even now she’s not sure how she feels about it. “My husband and I go back and forth on whether it's kind of cringey or awesome,” she says. “We’re not really sure.”
It took more than two years for the second season to hit Netflix, but after it did, Paris became a full-on fan. She loves when shows commit to their weirdness (she cites The Leftovers as another fave), and when season two shifted into another dimension, she forgave any quibbles she had. She got a tattoo of the OA (Marling’s character Prairie Johnson, also known as the Original Angel) doing the Movements. A week later, in August 2019, the show was canceled.
This was during the early boom of streaming. Cancellations weren’t uncommon (RIP, Marvel shows on Netflix), but at the time Netflix seemed so big that it could support the wild ideas of filmmakers like Marling and Batmanglij. Still, the industry was shifting. Shows, save for maybe megahits like Stranger Things, start to lose their ability to attract new subscribers after a certain number of years, and their value goes down. When another sci-fi show with a devoted fan base, Sense8, got canceled two years earlier, Netflix’s chief content officer at the time, Ted Sarandos, noted that while the audience was passionate it was “not large enough to support the economics of something that big, even on our platform.”
Fans of The OA, looking to save their show, came out in force. They held flash mobs in Times Square, where a billboard financed via GoFundMe flashed #SaveTheOA over Midtown. Some performed the Movements outside Netflix’s Manhattan office. Pickets were also held outside the streamer’s Los Angeles headquarters, where they held signs that read, “Algorithms don’t tell stories. Human hearts do”—presumably a reference to the company’s perceived and real reliance on data for what shows its users get to see. Paris started a podcast, Talking OA. The efforts were akin to fans writing letters to save Star Trek or sending light bulbs to save Friday Night Lights, but also different. More than trying to demonstrate to Netflix that lots of people watched the show, the fans seemed determined to show the company they cared about it—or, to use tech industry parlance, they engaged with it.
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“So many people watched the show, like it was sort of in the upper range of their midrange shows, which was for Netflix, huge numbers,” Marling says. “It used to be that a show on broadcast would maybe get canceled if like 1 or 2 million people watched it, but you could have a show on Netflix that upwards of 20 million people watched, and somehow when the business model changed there, it just didn't quite fit their new economies of scale.”
That created what Marling calls a “complicated dissonance” where she could go all over the world and meet people “whose devotion to the story is deep, and then to not be able to finish the narrative for them.”
Neither subscriber numbers nor fan momentum moved the needle—Netflix did not change its mind—but the fan base remained. There are still Reddit subs dedicated to the series. The original Save The OA Discord is no longer active, Paris says, but a new one called Angel Neurosis launched this summer where fans talk about OA, Murder at the End of the World, and the work of Marling and Batmanglij.
Next March, there will be an online conference dedicated to discussing the show as it relates to topics spanning Homer’s Iliad, LGBTQ+ representation, ontology, the metaverse, and dance. It’s a demonstration that sometimes fan dedication doesn’t show up in viewership numbers, and while that was also true for Firefly, My So-Called Life, and scores of other canceled shows, the perception that streamers will just focus on good enough shows with decent ROI can have an impact on how loyal those same viewers are to the streamers themselves.
“In recent years it feels like Netflix has become an impenetrable fortress in terms of how it interacts with its viewership as a whole and series fans in particular,” says Marisa Hates, a film scholar at the University of Brighton and one of the organizers of the upcoming OA conference. “We're all left to wonder why wonderfully innovative and popular shows are canceled.”
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Those fans may never know why Netflix axed The OA (the company didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story), but as the streaming wars plod on, all of the services are going to need to do more to get and keep viewers. As Batmanglij and Marling take their new show to Hulu, it’s likely their most devoted fans will follow them. Maybe. “This is so silly, but I’m scared I’m not going to love [A Murder at the End of the World],” Paris says. “Or, rather, I was really scared, and then they finally released a trailer, and I was like, ‘Oh, this feels OA-ish.’”
A Murder at the End of the World also feels like it was born in chaos. It was, but to its own benefit.
Marling and Batmanglij began working on the idea that would become Murder in 2019. When things shut down in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, they just thought it wasn’t the show’s time. Normally they sell their ideas to studios by talking about them, acting out scenes in meetings—not possible in quarantine. “Then our lawyer called us and she said, ‘You know, people are selling stuff on Zoom,’ and we were like ‘What’s Zoom?’” Batmanglij says.
The pair made up a 14-page document outlining their whole seven-episode arc. They took meetings with lots of players, including Netflix, and ultimately took the show to FX, which gave them a healthy budget, but they won’t say what it was. “I just don't know how helpful it is because the budgets were all affected so much by the pandemic,” Batmanglij says.
This may seem like an artful dodge of a journalist’s question, but it might not be totally off. A huge chunk of Murder takes place at a compound in a remote part of Iceland—the mysterious location the tech bro has flown all of his guests to. Part of that hotel was a set they built in New Jersey—or at least tried to, until Covid supply-chain issues made wood scarce. (They figured it out.) The rest was filmed on location in Iceland, a nation that lifted all of its Covid restrictions while they were on the plane there, leaving their whole cast and crew working toward herd immunity with the rest of the country.
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“Everybody at some point, it felt like, got it,” Marling says. “And we'd have to shut down and restart, and actors who would leave would get Covid somewhere else and then couldn't come back. So we were like, the night before, writing people out of scenes.”
After six months, in September 2022, they finally wrapped filming. Originally, the show was scheduled to debut this summer, but FX delayed it to November as the Hollywood strikes raged on.
Speaking to Marling and Batmanglij in early October, seated in a cozy booth in a café at the Hotel Chelsea, it’s obvious they believe in Murder at the End of the World as much as they believed in The OA. Like all of their work, its meaning is layered but also blunt. “There is something about the way this was made, which was at the most brutal part of the pandemic and the climate crisis, that felt to me like, ‘Oh, this is just the new reality of making things in this modern time’—you have to be resilient,” says Marling.
Resilient and direct. One perk of making a limited series for filmmakers like Batmanglij and Marling is that they know people will see their ending. There’s no need to hope for a renewal. When the show’s final episode is released on December 19, that’s it. Fans will know the denouement, the murder at the end of the world will be solved. As for the duo’s other mystery, Marling holds out hope for that too. They know how their last show was meant to end, and she says she has “this weird feeling that The OA is somehow gonna come back around.” Maybe this time, the world will be watching.
