Everyone is watching Stranger Things, but this hidden thriller is actually better

The first several episodes from the fifth and final season of Stranger Things are now out, and everyone is understandably excited. After all, Stranger Things is a generational TV show that’s been building momentum ever since it debuted on Netflix in 2016. Everyone wants to know how it ends.

But that same year, another sci-fi thriller debuted on Netflix that may beat Stranger Things at its own game, even if it never became as popular.

The OA is stranger than Stranger Things

And may be better

The OA is a wildly original series that could only have been made at an earlier time when Netflix was willing to throw large amounts of money at new, exciting ideas. The show is about Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), a blind woman who was missing for seven years. She returns to her adoptive parents one day, now able to see. She has scars on her back and now goes by the name “the OA,” or “Original Angel.”

We spend most of the first season figuring out how she got this way. As a child, Prairie had a near-death experience that rendered her blind. Later, she worked with a scientist named Hap (Jason Isaacs), who is studying people with near-death experiences, or NDEs. I’ll leave the details for you to discover, because a lot of them are truly unexpected, but I’ll say that we eventually learn that there’s a connection between NDEs and alternate dimensions. What happens after you die? Is there an afterlife? The OA explores age-old questions like that in the guise of a twisty, tightly plotted sci-fi thriller.

What stands out most about The OA is how singular and unique it feels. Outside of Jason Isaacs (who played Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies), there aren’t any name actors in the cast, nor is it based on any recognizable IP. The show is executive-produced by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who directs most of the episodes. There’s a hand-crafted feeling to the whole thing.

The OA vs. Stranger Things

The more things are alike, the more they’re different

That said, there’s a reason we’re recommending this show to people who enjoy Stranger Things, because there is some cross-over. Hap’s experiments on Prairie and on other people who have experienced NDEs recall what Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the other psychic test subjects go through on Stranger Things. Even the goal of the experiments is roughly the same: to make contact with a kind of alternate dimension.

On Stranger Things, this is the Upside Down, a dark mirror of our world populated with monsters. On The OA, things are weirder: in the patiently paced first season, it’s not exactly clear what Hap and the test subjects are going to find on the other side of these experiments, which adds a layer of existential mystery that Stranger Things doesn’t have. In the second season of The OA, we spend a lot of time in this alternate dimension, which is less of a horrorscape and more of an alternate reality of the kind you might see on a show like The Man in High Castle. And season 2 ends with a new twist on the alternate reality concept so bold I don’t dare say more for fear of spoiling you.

In terms of tone, The OA is more self-serious than Stranger Things, which cuts its drama with a lot of humor and nostalgia. Both of these shows are escapist fantasy to some extent, but Stranger Things takes things to another level by setting itself in the 1980s, whereas The OA engages with issues that are still being talked about today: some characters take drugs, there are plot points that involve Russian oligarchs and tech billionaires, and there’s a twist on our modern political reality that feels as surreal today as it did several years ago.

At the end of the day, it comes down to taste. Stranger Things tackles some of the same themes as The OA, but in a lighter, brighter way. The OA gets deeper and darker with it, which in the long run may be more satisfying.

The OA was taken before its time

But we don’t have to give up hope

Credit: Olivia Bee / Netflix

Netflix canceled The OA after its widely lauded second season, leaving the show’s passionate fans in a lurch. There were petitions to save the show, fans bought billboards, and one of them even went on a hunger strike outside Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters; Marling and Batmanglij went to see her and offered her food and water.

That kind of hands-on touch is ultimately why The OA felt so special, and it was a huge shame that Marling and Batmanglij didn’t get to go through with their original five-season plan.

Or didn’t they?

netflix stranger things season 4 finale end shots.

5 supernatural shows scarier, weirder, and darker than Stranger Things

Stranger Things is almost over, but there are lots of other shows out there waiting to fill the void it will leave behind.

The cast and crew of The OA still want to finish it

When a show gets canceled, it’s not uncommon to hear the cast and crew members talk hopefully about a revival, but the people behind The OA sound like they really mean it. In particular, Jason Isaacs has been talking for years about bringing the show back, and he sounds very confident. “[W]e have not let it go, and then we will find some way to finish that story, believe me,” he told Collider in July 2025.

Shows get revivals and continuations all the time nowadays. With Stranger Things just about to end, it could be the perfect time for The OA, its spiritual sister show, to come back. And in the meantime, those first two seasons are well worth watching on their own.