I Never Wanted to Spend a Decade With ‘Stranger Things’

Five seasons. Nine years. Child stars married. Netflix budgets blown. The Duffer Brothers’ unprecedented level of creative control. It’s been a long road for Stranger Things. With the release of the trailer for the final season (there’s bigger monsters, bigger conspiracies, bigger children), we’re expected to generate more excitement for a show that’s overstayed its cultural moment. 

The show’s core cast is all old enough to have facial hair, horrible political opinions and get married. The synopsis of the three-part release of Season Five fails to promise anything new. It’s still big bad Vecna, it’s still “Where’s Eleven?” 

“The fall of 1987,” reads the official description. “Hawkins is scarred by the opening of the Rifts, and our heroes are united by a single goal: find and kill Vecna. But he has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown. Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding.”

It’s old hat. There’s no spark. To be frank, I’ve started to be on the side of Vecna, as long as it puts the show on a faster track to finally conclude. Let the world end; waiting years between seasons is just not worth it. I’m not keeping track of subplots and side characters. I barely even remember which characters are still alive. 

This isn’t just a problem with Stranger Things, even though it’s the most expensive, most dramatic example. More and more shows are spending more time between seasons, for fewer episodes. There’s a lot of reasons why — a desire to spend less money on large crews, filming schedules for double-booked casts, the writers’ strike, the pandemic. But it still doesn’t change my feelings on the matter. Very few shows should even run for the length of Stranger Things. But nine years for five seasons? It’s too long. 

The ultimate problem, I think, is that Stranger Things started at the beginning of the nostalgia craze. It was novel to go back in time, to revisit the era of malls and big hair and no cell phones. Stranger Things had a late summer camp vibe, everything we wanted to remember our childhoods as. But nostalgia, ironically, has gotten very old. Nostalgia has been a lubricant for facism. People are so occupied with missing how things “used to be” that we’ve walked civil liberties back a century. 

Put it in this context: The first season of Stranger Things aired a few months before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. When I watched that show for the first time, Trump was just a punchline. Now, he’s still a punchline — but he’s got the nuclear codes (again). 

Stranger Things happened too slowly, while the world changed too quickly. Plus, those kids look old as hell, man.