The OA and what's going on with bad philosophical tv

Why did so many shows this year try so hard and fail so badly?

Alice Krige and Brit Marling star in The OA.
(Image credit: JoJo Whilden/Netflix)

I look forward to a TV series that finds a redemptive metaphor for our spiritual rot. I truly do. We need it. Ideally, it'll be a bit of philosophical jiu-jitsu so penetrating and dramatically effective that it will neither require the viewer to politely ignore enormous plot holes nor condemn her to reading Reddit threads into the wee hours as she tries to piece together what just happened with other confused and hungry souls.

The OA is not that series.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.