The OA’s success made Murder at the End of the World’s culprit clear to its creators

polygon.com:

You don’t have to be familiar with the specifics of the mystery of The OA to know people are obsessed with The OA. The show, co-created and starring Brit Marling, is often pretty high up on the rec list for people looking for twisty, cult sci-fi hits, thanks to its humanistic approach to a zigzagging and even outright bizarre mystery. And the fanbase is still hungry for more.

So it’s no surprise that when crafting A Murder at the End of the World, Marling and herOA co-creator Zal Batmanglij were aware fans wanted more of what The OA offered — a mystery balanced between its thoughtful characters and its ambitious themes — even if the scope of the show felt totally different.

Still, OA fans will notice that the new series encompasses a lot of the same genre-bending techniques that The OA did. A Murder is a whodunnit at a remote retreat in Iceland, hosted by a mysterious tech billionaire. Like The OA before it, the central mystery is blended against one from the past, with flashbacks to Darby (Emma Corrin) on the hunt for a serial killer. Marling and Batmanglij said the main pressure they felt from OA fans when crafting another mystery was how rabid the hunger is for “rich, layered, mysterious storytelling,” which they hoped to replicate here.

“I think [the genre-blending] just happened sort of naturally; we are drawn to different things. And we think, Oh, let’s weave the whodunnit with a sort of road trip love story,” Batmanglij says. “It just came to us and then we rode those two trajectories out.”

It was the same way they approached their lead, Darby. The character came to the writing duo first in what they describe as a “childhood memory” of a young girl exposed to crime scenes through her father’s work as a medical