The OA’s creators announce a new murder mystery series, Retreat

Two years after the mind-bending sci-fi series The OA was controversially cancelled by Netflix, creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have announced that they’re working on a new show, titled Retreat.

Like The OA before it, the mystery show is set to star Marling in the lead role: Darby Hart, a Gen Z amateur sleuth who is tasked with solving a murder at the secluded retreat of a reclusive billionaire. “When one of the other guests is found dead, Darby must fight to prove it was murder against a tide of competing interests, and before the killer takes another life,” reads a synopsis shared by Deadline.

Given the greenlight by FX, the show will be written and directed by Marling, in collaboration with Batmanglij. Transparent’s Andrea Sperling is also credited as an executive producer.

FX Networks chairman John Landgraf expanded on the coming project in a recent press tour, revealing that a “pretty good chunk of it” is set in “an ultra luxury hotel adjacent to a glacier in a very forbidding northern place”, though it also has a “very substantial chunk that takes place in the desert and various other locales”.

“We absolutely loved what Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij came to us with,” Landgraf adds, “which is radical reconceptualisation of ‘whodunit’ with a really, really original set of characters... It’s a distinctive and unique show that is not that easy to produce.”

“Zal and I have been writing intensely for over a year and a half on this,” Marling adds in a post on Instagram. “I’ve never felt a character pour out of us like Darby Hart has. Very excited to bring it to the screen and you all… think this one’s a doozy”

Naturally, fans of The OA will be enthusiastic about any new project from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, having turned out in droves for passionate protests — including flash mobs and even hunger strikes — against the decision to cancel their former series. 

The new show also doesn’t mean that we should give up hope for a continuation of The OA, with Marling writing in a recent Instagram post: “For all the true blue OA fans — we love you, we see you. And we promise that one way or another we will find a way to keep telling that story… YCFM.”