Jack Parsons helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory while also serving for years as head of the Agape Lodge, Ordo Templi Orientis's Pasadena outpost, under the direct correspondence of Aleister Crowley himself. That combination, rocketry by day and ceremonial sex magick by night, resists dramatization by being too strange to need embellishing, and gets embellished anyway.
Strange Angel, the CBS All Access series that ran two seasons in 2018 and 2019, names Ordo Templi Orientis directly and puts its Pasadena lodge on screen, following Parsons from junior chemist to occultist in a fictionalized version of events adapted from George Pendle's 2005 biography. Creator Mark Heyman has been explicit about where the show departs from the record: an invented neighbor character, a changed name for Parsons' wife, and a first season that frontloads his science before leaning into occult material Parsons did not hide but a network drama had to earn the right to show.
What makes this worth recording as a media representation of the order, rather than merely of Crowley or Thelema generally, is the specificity: the show does not invent a fictional secret society standing in for OTO. It uses the real name, the real lodge and a real historical membership, then dramatizes around that scaffold rather than replacing it. A viewer comes away knowing OTO existed in 1930s Pasadena and that a real rocket scientist belonged to it, even where the surrounding texture is invention.
That is a different kind of representation than an order's own production, and the distinction is the point of recording both kinds separately. Strange Angel shows how the order is seen and dramatized from outside, built on a documented membership its makers did not have to invent.