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Comment by bobbyi_settv | Hacker News Reader

Can we at least agree that they are seeking to "maximize variables and checkboxes" much less now than in the past?

They started with Game of Cards and Orange is the New Black which are the strongest examples in history of creating content based on what data tells you people want, because those were their first few series and they couldn't afford to have them flop.

Nowadays, they make such a wide range of shows, they can afford to sometimes just take a risk on giving talented people money and hoping they make a great show that finds an audience.

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Game of Cards would be an interesting watch.

One series I've enjoyed recently is The OA which is definitely not a box-ticking exercise of a series - the complete opposite. I'm happy it's been renewed for a second season, but I can't imagine it's driving any revenue directly.

Anecdotal but I can't stand the OA. Loved it until the dancing aspect. Total turn off from the show. :\

I was also somewhat irritated by that. I still enjoyed the rest, though. The whole dancing thing just made me realize for the first time that the show won't keep all it's promises (for instance, the scene when OA bites the dog and it becomes "tame" had a lot of mystery surrounding it - but that's never resolved. And can never properly be explained by dancing ;-) ).

This sentiment seems fairly common in various comment threads I've seen. The dancing aspect seems to evoke in some people... discomfort or something hard to pin down, and I wonder why. At the end of the day, electricity is still electricity whether it's being delivered through power lines or pulsed through fiber optics or pulled and stored in someone as static electricity as they dance. Most science fiction dealing with time travel or teleportation seems to rely on a machine or a suit or a phone booth or some mysterious futuristic means of energy. Yet tribal dancing is one of the oldest human traditions of energy expenditure, done ritualistically. It doesn't seem entirely outlandish to me that a certain configuration of certain energy expenditures by humans could create some sort of ripple or warp or whatever in time space.

I think part of the problem is that it signified a shift in genre for a lot of people. You start out with a mad scientist who is doing experiments trying to understand death and the story of the girl who escaped his grasps. The dancing scene transitioned the show to be about someone who can heal people with hand gestures. I enjoyed the twists, but I can certainly imagine someone viewing it as going from (somewhat) hard sci-fi to being about magic and that change turning them off the show. The fact that the actual dancing look ridiculous also probably didn't help.

I believe the dancing being ridiculous as well as the breathing sounds combined could have been the turning factors.

What? It was a story about an unreliable narrator and about belief the whole time to me - the story being told could've been anything.

I find a lot of shows are trying to check both the "belief in belief" box and the "sciency" box at the same time, and it does a disservice to both. The OA on Netflix and The Oasis on Amazon are just two examples.

But the show doesn't give the viewer any solid evidence that the dancing did anything really. We have to trust the characters, and they could be unreliable narrators. The main characters in the show could be schizophrenic.

It's like a homeless man being in a cardboard box and duct tape suit screaming about his mech suit. You just feel bad for him.

It felt like a cheap attempt at being mysterious or deep. If you look at the people behind the show, it's seems like this is part for the course with their work.

The whole point of the show is that you can't know either way. You bring your own beliefs of what the show is about.

If someone told you the same story OA did, would you believe them?

Oh my. I didn't make it past the first episode, but "dancing aspect" sounds so awful I almost want to go resume watching it.

If you want a spoiler, this is what it all culminates to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3cqhNJkmIs (final scene of the season)

The OA is amazing and beautiful. I loved the incorporation of primal & tribal dancing -- it's been a huge driver of healing from trauma since the dawn of man.

OA seems like a poor cousin of Stranger Things. Very slow paced and nothing much happens in S1.

The OA isn't for everyone. I loved it and thought the first season was thrilling. It reminds me of the leftovers, not because of any common tone or theme, but because it's a show people either love or really don't like.

If you want to see slow paced, Sense8 takes the biscuit. I count about 10 minutes of actual plot over the entire season, primarily concentrated in the first and last episodes. It's obviously meant to be a character-driven story, but each of the characters is a two-dimensional stereotype.

I loved the OA, so perhaps I'll like Stranger Things even more? If I loved OA is it worth checking out ST?

How much of a say does Netflix has on the production of the shows? I thought one of the advantage of Netflix was that they don't interfere with the production of the shows and they let the creative people make the decisions.

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