All Kidding Aside, I Find the Creative Arc of Stranger Things to Be Quite Sad

My critical thoughts on Stranger Things have proven to be one of the more popular posts in the history of this newsletter. It was, of course, written in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, which is something I like to do sometimes. (I don’t know why some readers seem unable to grasp that writers sometime exaggerate their feelings for argumentative or comedic or stylistic effect.) It seems a lot of people were also dissatisfied with that first batch of Season Five episodes too. Well, while I thought the finale was a bit better than the rest of the season, I still think the show really fell on its face in the final lap - and I think the specific ways the show got worse speaks to a lot of problems with modern pop culture storytelling. Stranger Things suffered from specific and particular issues, but also from structural problems with how serialized stories are written and produced now.

To be clear, and to be fair, Stranger Things was never going to be my… thing. That’s largely thanks to the nerd-worship issues I discussed in that earlier piece, which is kind of the heart of the show. And I am really deeply bothered by the way the Duffer Brothers play fast and loose with 80s pop culture history. I’ve mentioned several times that the idea of a 14 year old from suburban Indiana being obsessed with Kate Bush bothers me, and a few people have asked me why that particular detail would be a problem in a show about telekinetic teenagers and demons from another dimension. The reason is pretty straightforward: Stranger Things is an act of celebration and worship of 1980s pop culture. That’s superficially obvious and the Duffer Brothers have said it explicitly many times. Well, if you’re demanding I take 80s pop culture references seriously, which the show is very much doing, then I demand that we tell the truth about 80s pop culture. An honest show would have had that character be obsessed with Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” or “Higher Love” by Stevie Winwood, not “Running Up That Hill.” The trouble is that those songs aren’t cool to a 2020s audience, while Kate Bush will always be cool, so they did the cool thing instead of the authentically 80s thing. But the whole