Netflix is home to two of the boldest things American television has tried, and while I thank them for giving it a go (and while I enjoy many of these international partnership series they’ve been producing lately), if they are getting out of the “unique vision” business, that’s a shame. I’m not sure there’s really anyone else filling that niche.
The shows I mean, of course, are the late, lamented Sense8 and the just-cancelled after two seasons Brit Marling series, The OA.
Once upon a time, on a blog I no longer maintain online anywhere, I tried to suss out what exactly was at the heart of what made Sense8 work.
Sense8, is legit, is the real deal (for me anyway), because it’s literally about empathy. Rather than being thrust together in an isolated physical location as in Lost, its characters are thrust together mentally and emotionally, isolated from each other in disparate physical locations. They don’t merely need to confront how to live with one another, but how to live within one another.
At their deepest level, this is what all drama is about; it was just that Sense8 took advantage of its genre and literalized it.
As for The OA, it was gloriously earnest in a give-no-fucks way that often seems all too uncommon, perhaps because we seem to disdain earnestness (the cafeteria movements sequence in its first season finale is something of a Rorschach test), but I think I will just let Brit Marling describe it for herself, in words that almost could have been written about Sense8, too.
We imagined that the collective is stronger than the individual. We imagined that there is no hero. We imagined that the trees of San Francisco and a giant pacific octopus had voices we could understand and ought to listen to. We imagined humans as one species among many and not necessarily the wisest or most evolved. We imagined movements that got unlikely people in rooms together, got them moving, got them willing to risk vulnerability for the chance to step into another world.