Something is happening with The OA and I need to talk about it. Why? Because I am one of the biggest fans of this show out there – and rumors are running wild about the possibility that The OA is coming back. And I couldn’t possibly be happier.
The internet is currently in the middle of a fresh round of genuine, legitimate, this-time-it-feels-different excitement about The OA Season 3, and if you are not already in the fandom or have never seen the show, I want to tell you what you’ve been missing and why this matters. And if you ARE already in the fandom, you already know why you’re here, we will get to it, I promise.
But first. What the heck is The OA?
What Is The OA and Why Does It Have the Most Devoted Fanbase on the Internet
The OA premiered on Netflix on December 16, 2016. Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij. Brit and and Zal are an infamous pair in the indie film circuit. They have created some of the most fantastic movies and series of all time… but maybe they aren’t even on your radar. Films like The Sound of My Voice, The East, A Murder at the End of the World and obviously, two seasons of the planned five for The OA. And Brit Marling has gone on to create even more brilliantly fantastic films, Another Earth, I, Origins, etc etc. If I’ve done nothing for you but to highlight for you these amazing movies, then I’ve done a fantastic thing for you today. You are welcome.
But The OA specifically… stars Marling as Prairie Johnson, a young woman who disappeared seven years earlier, blind, and returns home able to see, calling herself The OA. She won’t tell the FBI what happened to her. She won’t tell her adoptive parents. But she will tell a small group of misfits she assembles in an abandoned house in her Michigan suburb, gathering them in secret at night to share the story of where she was, what was done to her, and what she learned.
What she tells them is this: she was held captive by a scientist named Hap (Jason Isaacs, doing some of the best villain work of his career) who was conducting near-death experience experiments on Prairie and four others he’d also imprisoned. And through those experiments, through dying and coming back over and over, they discovered something. Movements. Five specific physical movements that, performed together by enough people, could open a door between dimensions.
I know. I know how that sounds. Stick with me. It’s actually hauntingly brilliant… exultantly moving. Trust me on this.
So yeah, The OA is not a show that is easy to describe without sounding like you’ve lost the plot. It is the kind of show that you have to watch with someone who already loves it, or alone at midnight when your defenses are down, and let it do what it does to you. Because what it does to you is not small, or slight… or innocuous. The Season 1 finale has a sequence involving those five movements performed in a school cafeteria by five people who have never danced in their lives, trying to save someone from a school shooter, and I defy you to watch it and feel nothing. That sequence made people sob in ways they couldn’t explain afterward. It went viral. It became a kind of cultural touchstone for a certain type of person who watches ambitious television and feels it at a frequency other people don’t seem to share.
Season 2 arrived in March 2019 and went even further. Prairie jumps to a new dimension, which turns out to be San Francisco in an alternate present, where she has lived a completely different life as a Russian heiress. The show adds a new cast of characters, introduces an octopus that appears to be sentient and multidimensional, and builds toward a finale in which Prairie and Hap complete the five movements together and jump again, landing in what appears to be a Netflix television production, in which an actress named Brit Marling is playing a character called The OA, and an actor named Jason Isaacs is playing a character named Hap.
The show had been designed as a five-season story. The creators had pitched it to Netflix that way from the beginning. Season 2 was the second chapter of a five-part plan and it ended on what might be the single most ambitious cliffhanger in television history: the characters stepping onto the set of their own show, the fiction folding into itself, reality and narrative collapsing into one another, and then… nothing. Five months after Season 2 premiered, Netflix cancelled it.
What Netflix Did and Why the Fanbase Never Forgave Them
The cancellation happened in August 2019 and the reaction was immediate and visceral. Fans gathered outside Netflix’s offices and performed the five movements on the sidewalk. There were petitions. There were social media campaigns. There were hand-painted signs. The #SaveTheOA movement became one of the most sustained and organized fan campaigns for a cancelled series in recent memory, and it has never fully stopped. Seven years later, fans are still performing the movements on TikTok, still organizing, still showing up.
Netflix’s statement was the corporate-speak version of a door closing: “We are incredibly proud of the 16 mesmerizing chapters of The OA, and are grateful to Brit and Zal for sharing their audacious vision and for realizing it through their incredible artistry. We look forward to working with them again in the future, in this and perhaps many other dimensions.”
That last line, “in this and perhaps many other dimensions,” is either the most tone-deaf thing a PR team has ever written, or the cruelest. Either way, fans noticed.
The wound has never healed. And I say that not as hyperbole but as a genuine observation about what The OA did to the people who found it. It is the kind of show that becomes part of how you understand certain things, about grief and trauma and the body and what love looks like when it has nowhere to go. Yeah, none of us fans of The OA ever let that go… at least I for one, never did.
Why 2026 Is Different
Here is where it gets interesting.
Jason Isaacs, who played Hap and has been one of the most consistent and credible voices for revival across the seven years since cancellation, sat down with BBC Radio host Jo Whiley on her podcast earlier this year and said simply: “We will not let it go.” He confirmed that he has recently met with Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij to discuss what a future for The OA might actually look like. At Fan Expo Denver in 2025, he told a room full of fans on the record that the story will be finished “somehow.” Isaacs has been careful with his language on this topic for years. He does not throw fans empty comfort. The fact that he is now using words like “somehow” and confirming active conversations is meaningfully different from what he has said before.
Marling herself, in a 2024 interview, used a phrase that has been circling through the fandom ever since: “dormant seeds.” The story, she said, is still alive. “Of course we think about that story all the time.” Batmanglij added that fans approaching them out of nowhere, from every background and language and walk of life, has continued to inspire them. The audience is still there. The creators still know what happens next. Jason Isaacs was told the full Season 3 plan by Marling and Batmanglij years ago and has described what he heard as escalating “well beyond” what Season 2 attempted, which is a sentence that should make you sit down if you’ve seen Season 2.
The complication everyone in these conversations dances around is this: Marling and Batmanglij do not own The OA. Netflix does. All the creative willingness in the world, all of Isaacs’ promises at fan conventions, none of it moves the property forward without Netflix choosing to act. And Netflix in 2026 is making different calculations than Netflix in 2019. The prestige niche market has proven more commercially resilient than their 2019 metrics predicted. They have reversed high-profile cancellations before. The OA has maintained a genuinely anomalous level of sustained fan engagement for a seven-year-old cancelled show, which is exactly the kind of library value that makes a streaming platform’s content team look twice.
And then there is TikTok.
The movement is still happening on TikTok, literally and figuratively. Fans are posting themselves doing the five movements. Fans are making videos breaking down the Season 3 plan Isaacs has hinted at. Jason Isaacs appeared on Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos’ show and told them directly that he will do “whatever it takes” to bring the show back. One TikTok creator recently posted a video asking if Netflix was actively hinting at a return this year. The comments are full of people who have clearly never stopped waiting. One fan put it perfectly: “I’ll be clowning until it’s been 7 years, 3 months and 11 days exactly and probably even then.”
That’s the thing about The OA fandom. They have been doing this for seven years and they have not burned out. That is almost unheard of. That is what the show did to them.
There is no greenlight. There is no official announcement. There is no confirmed Season 3. But there are active conversations, a cast that has never moved on, creators who still know what happens next, a platform that is making different decisions than it was in 2019, and a fanbase that has been performing five specific movements on sidewalks and TikTok for seven years while they wait.
Something is happening. It may not happen on the timeline the fandom needs it to happen. But something is happening.
In this and perhaps many other dimensions, the OA is still running.
