The key ingredients barely need repeating. The Duffer brothers took the best of 80s pop culture – elements of John Carpenter, Steph(v)ens King and Spielberg – shoved them in with Dungeons & Dragons, New Order and Winona Ryder, and ended up with an algorithm-busting, genre-melding, word-of-mouth smash. From the deep-dive discussion of the plot to the soundtrack, the title graphics, the endless memes and a new star in the shape of Millie Bobby Brown, Stranger Things provided a genuine 2016 TV moment.
Set in the fictional Indiana town of Hawkins, Stranger Things is the story of the mysterious disappearance of Will Byers, one-quarter of a gang of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds. It quickly spread its narrative out over eight episodes into string-theory-twisting sci-fi horror via real-life CIA conspiracy thriller with a side of high-school romance.
What’s interesting about the Duffers’ vision is that their nostalgia for the 80s is secondhand. They were born in 1984, so their depiction of the era is told through a language learned from VHS tapes and old records. It’s 90s kids giving us their version of an 80s where 11-year-olds were free to ride their BMXs around pitch-dark towns; where parents wouldn’t notice if their children sneaked an escapee from a government black-ops experiment in to live in the basement. If you grew up watching ET or It from behind the sofa, it’s a world that’s a long way from today’s helicopter-parented Gen Zs. But it’s not like you had to be steeped in the intricacies of Dungeons & Dragons to lap up its love of its period. (What actually is a Demogorgon?)
Stranger Things triumphed on two key fronts. Its plot whipped viewers through the series, delivering a narrative cycle as satisfying as the first season of Twin Peaks. (Though, one wonders if a second series will also struggle to deliver in the same way that Lynch’s did.) But it was the performances that really made it hard not to binge episode after episode in a spooky Netflix haze.
Leading the way were the four (then three) nerdy boys – particularly the wonderful Gaten Matarazzo – who managed to combine doctoral-level physics with basic compassion in the hunt for their friend. Then a Freaks and Geeks-like dynamic of younger and older high-school kids was added with the dark, non-love triangle between Natalia Dyer’s Nancy, Joe Deery’s Steve and Charlie Heaton’s Jonathan. And that was a nod to the kind of 80s movies starred in by Ryder – whose bereft, mad-not-mad Joyce, Will’s mother, confirmed the TV rebirth hinted at by her turn in David Simon’s Show Me a Hero in 2015.
But the breakout star ended up being English actor Millie Bobby Brown as the shaven-headed psychokinetically-powered Eleven. An escapee from a government facility’s MKUltra-style experiments, her abilities powered the entire story. Brown’s intense performance (undercut slightly if you happened to land on the videos of her singing Amy Winehouse songs on YouTube) made her the face of the show. At just 12, she has the makings of a superstar.
After a terrifying first episode, Stranger Things became gradually less scary as it unfolded and explained (or sort of explained) its secrets. But it still contained a moment that had this viewer considering going to bed with the lights on – and not the fairy lights in the living room. Let’s just say that many of us will never listen to Should I Stay Or Should I Go? in an empty house again.
At the end, we learned of Will’s fate. (Though it’s not exactly clear what happened to Barb.) We also got a final scene suggesting that we’ve not seen the last of the creatures from the Upside Down. Given the year 2017 is shaping up to be, the idea of slipping into a pitch-black parallel reality filled with demons might not be the strangest thing in the world.
