Stranger Things: Series Review

It’s hard to imagine there’s anyone out there who hasn’t heard of Stranger Things, it’s a cultural phenomenon with millions of fans of different ages, and all sorts of merchandise, fan content, and spoofs. Recently, as I was walking around the city where I live, I saw a poster with a reference to Stranger Things. It’s inescapable. Surely you’ve heard of it, but is it worth the watch?

A fair warning to everyone who plans to watch this series, if you have never consumed any forms of 80s media, from books to movies to TV shows, you will not fully appreciate Stranger Things. Sure, the series will be fine, but the full breadth of the experience will be lost. The series relies very heavily on that decade, and a lot of the attention towards the series is a result of nostalgia from people who grew up on those shows, whether they grew up in that decade or were the children of those that grew up in that decade. With that, the show has an air of campiness and predictability. I felt that I had seen a lot of the scenes before in other shows/movies that actually came from that time period. In the later seasons, the show breaks away from that a little bit, but overall it’s original in how well it proves to be an homage, but the actual content itself is not original at all. If you hated all media that was released to the public in the years from 1980-1989, or if you don’t care to see a show that relies so heavily on that content, this show is not for you.

It wouldn’t be a review if I didn’t talk about the actually series’ quality. Stranger Things is exceptional. Everything, from the writing to the cinematography to the acting is excellent. This is one of very few shows where the children are played by actual children that are also good at acting. There are very few examples of that anywhere(Haley Joel Osment and Freddie Highmore are all that come to mind, and even they weren’t perfect). The show’s scary moments are actually scary, the show’s comedic moments are mostly funny, and the show’s emotionally charged moments are actually emotionally charged.

Also, even though the show has three seasons, I decided to only do one review. This is because all of the seasons after season one have the same exact quality as season one with some subtle differences. I suggest you skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers. Season two is basically the same as season one, but season three tries, and succeeds, to be diverse. As I mentioned in my review of the first episode of The Terror, certain shows, for example, Netflix’s Orange is the New Black in its final season, try very hard to express certain political ideologies, and as a result, the show suffers in quality. In Stranger Things season three, a character come out as LGBT, and the other character accepts it whole-heartedly. While this would be an unquestionably lighthearted interaction if the show were based in 2019, but, in season three, it’s based in 1985, and it comes off as unrealistic for a show that so heavily tries to capture the essence of the 1980s, going so far as to not have any female characters that break away from the Madonna/whore complex and to have a scene in which the children stalk a female character that is played off as harmless given it’s the 1980s, even though it wouldn’t be considered harmless now.