Maybe it was the rekindling of Twin Peaks that served as the catalyst for the new wave of mystical small-town dramas. Or is it simply a cultural touchstone born in Peyton Place and iced like a cake in the ensuing decades with touches borrowed from Poltergeist and The Amityille Horror?
No sooner had we digested Stranger Things, the stepchild of Salem's Lot and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, than we had The OA (Netflix, on demand) drop from the sky into our virtual inboxes with almost no fanfare, which became a fanfare in itself.
Yep, it's the old no-marketing-marketing routine, now a common ploy in a highly competitive multi-channel environment.
Like most television puzzle boxes – think Lost, or even Twin Peaks – the jarring twist comes a the beginning, not the end. In this case, Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), a young woman who has been missing for seven years, resurfaces with no explanation. Her sight, lost to blindness, is now regained.
She now calls herself "the OA" and spurns the inquiries of the FBI in favour of telling her story to a group of locals whom she recruits for a mission, to save others she claims are caught in the same predicament which ensnared her.
Even that information is dropped piecemeal, like crumbs on the village green, intended for the curious to scoop up and follow. It's not to say that The OA is a pied piper of a television show, asking viewers to follow blindly, but it does mean the weight of commitment – as with most shows in this genre – lies with the viewer's curiosity more than anything truly binding in the narrative.
You could accuse The OA of being an assembly of cliches, tropes and tricks and borrowed tonal notes and you wouldn't be wrong. The mitigating argument is that modern television in this style is just that. Even David Lynch's Twin Peaks owes something to Peyton Place, though Lynch and Frost would no doubt roll their eyes at the suggestion.
The OA has an interesting cast, with Marling's enigmatic Prairie Johnson, Scott Wilson and Alice Krige as Abel and Nancy, Prairie's adopted parents, and Emory Cohen, Will Brill and Sharon Van Etten as Homer, Scott and Rachel, three other supposed abductees. Chuck in Jason Isaacs as a creepy doctor and Riz Ahmed – the man who is in everything these days – as an FBI agent and it's a recipe for a thick soup of personalities.
And the tonal notes, while derivative, are still engaging. The problem with The OA lies in timing more than anything else. Before the release of Stranger Things it might have been hailed as groundbreaking. But coming after, though the two shows are quite different, it's hard to escape the notion you're watching paints mixed from the same palette.
More broadly, the reaction to the series is polarised, perhaps for that reason. People either embrace it wholeheartedly, with its pseudo-scientific, mystical kookery, or reject it outright because it too closely resembles other, more familiar narratives, or fails to convince.
The OA rumbles along confidently, and the denouement is thrilling. But the measure of a puzzle box is not in its conclusion, but in the questions its asks. The enduring power of Twin Peaks, for example, lay not in discovering Laura Palmer's killer, but rather how her death peeled back layer after layer of the story. The OA is the reverse of that. Bumpy ride, smooth finish.
