Chapter 1: I Was A Teenage Successful 8-Part Miniseries

I settled in to rewatch season 1 of Stranger Things and finished it within two days. I didn’t initially remember it all that clearly— in my head there was the Demogorgon, the Christmas lights, lots of kids running around on bikes, and that was about it. The thing that struck me on rewatch was how vibrantly the soundscape, of all things, returned to me. I must’ve watched the show a lot more than I thought, because I subconsciously remembered when certain sound cues and line inflections would happen. I couldn’t recall the context at all, but I knew exactly when things would be said and how they would say it. It was surreal.

The year was 2016. The first year of the 2010s that people highlighted as being uniquely painful to get through. We’ve somehow looped back around to actually feeling nostalgia for that wretched period, possibly because the sentiment of just one bad year existing has become hopelessly naïve in the relentless landslide of events since. But it was July then, 5 months before Trump was elected, and Stranger Things season 1 released to a public who had not yet experienced COVID.

When I was younger these episodes felt a lot longer, but watching now, they felt extremely packed. This was a deliberate choice— the showrunners opted for 8 episodes rather than the previously-standard 22 because they believed they’d struggle to tell a cinematic story over that amount of time ^{1Leon, Melissa. “Inside “Stranger Things”: The Duffer Bros. On How They Made the TV Hit of the Summer.” The Daily Beast.} . Thus, the episodes are structured one subplot after another in a rotating carousel, a trend that Strangethings will not buck in its ensuing seasons to its own detriment. Here, it mostly works to enforce the season’s intended tone of danger and frantic mystery, as each plot eventually converges on the disappearance and subsequent search for Will Byers— definitely the emotional core and highlight of the season. The four groups’ subplots— the kids on bikes, the teens at school, the adults looking for answers, and the malicious government conspiracy— feel distinct in genre from one another, which is both a blessing and a curse. You get more variety, but about a fourth of a solidly executed plot; they all have their strengths and flaws.

The kids are by far the most entertaining of the bunch, and their banter adds a simultaneous comic relief and earnestness that would ultimately come to define the show’s tone. However, their potential dynamic with runaway psychic wunderkind Eleven is immediately eaten up by baby’s first bros vs. hoes conflict, which reduces both them and Eleven to their least interesting selves. The teens’ subplot plays with high school tropes to present shallow-seeming characters with deeper depths, then decides the best route to take these characters is a completely by-the-books love triangle. Joyce Byers, originator of the iconic phrase “Category 5 Woman Moment”^{2eternalgirlscout. “Winona Ryder’s Character in Stranger Things Has Never Been Wrong Even Once and Every Time the Fucking Gravity Turns off or Whatever She Says "Hey Thats Weird Right" and Everyone in a 10 Mile Radius Is like "Woah Category Five Woman Moment Incoming."” Tumblr.} , is one of the most unique protagonists of them all: a divorced single mom fresh out of an abusive marriage who’s immediately hit with (in no particular order) the disappearance of her child, the discovery that Hell is real, and a mass gaslighting attempt on part of the US government to convince her that said child died for real. Half her screen time is, unfortunately, taken up by Hawkins police chief Hopper, for whom the most charitable thing I can say is that he isn’t that bad this season. With the benefit of hindsight, the flashbacks to the tortured child laboratory really drags knowing it doesn’t ever become more than the base version of its premise.

You’d only really see it like that if you watched past the initial season, though— in a self-contained package, it’s serviceable. It’s tropey because it’s supposed to be tropey, it paints in broad strokes because it’s trying to evoke a feeling of the genre and the era. The Duffers pulled influences from a variety of media— nostalgic 80’s coming-of-age stories: The Goonies, Stand By Me, E.T.; your standard bevy of iconic horror media: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Carpenter’s The Thing, Stephen King’s IT; even a handful of anime with Akira and Elfen Lied— all in service of creating an authentic sense of throwback. The suburban setting is deliberately familiar to the point of cliché, but familiarity isn’t safety. A monster stalks the shadows and seeps through walls. Children are stalked, kidnapped, hunted down and eaten alive. The US government, who is completely at fault for this situation, is concerned only with retrieving their lost experiment and covering up the tracks.

It works. Maybe not at its full potential, but the potential is there. I personally don’t think this show should have ended after season 1— it just doesn’t execute on all its ideas at a high enough frequency to be a hit just based on that— but I can see the arguments from people who do. This is the version of Strangethings embedded into most people’s memories, the show they watched at formative times; in my case, at the same age as the child actors. Despite this, the show was certainly not made solely for children. It contains adult fear, adolescent horniness, graphic violence and overall maintains a mature tone. The kids’ innocence is played in contrast with the wider scope of the story, maintaining a certain level of whimsy within it, but in some ways contributing to its horror and tragedy.

This thing was an immediate, monstrous smash hit. It was the third most-watched season of a Netflix original to debut in 2016^{3Holloway, Daniel. “‘Stranger Things’ Ratings: Where Series Ranks Among Netflix’s Most Watched.” Variety.} , and made Netflix itself a household name for a lot of people. It got 18 nominations at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards. The child actors became instantly recognizable nationwide. 11 billion strangedollars at the thingsoffice. Kellogg collaborated with Netflix on a vintage Eggo commercial for the Super Bowl^{4Sloane, Garett. “Eggo’s Role in “Stranger Things” Turns into Free Super Bowl Mention with More to Come.” Adage.com.} because Eggos™ are Eleven’s patented© favorite® food. There will be Stranger Things-related comments under video uploads of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” possibly forever.

I’m singing the praises of the time, but after finishing the season, I found myself disappointed. I didn’t expect it to be great, but everything was somehow a tiny bit worse than how I remembered. It’s hard in 2026 to appreciate the things that were once novel, especially 80s throwback bullshit being a parody of a parody now. All the shit I didn’t like at the time is even more unbearable now that I’m not only gay but gay and picky. I believed then that the straight bits of this season were the worst part of it and a decade later I stand uncorrected. Strangethings cannot write romance for shit. It always becomes an albatross around the show’s neck that completely slows its momentum to a crawl.

Eleven has so much character potential it hurts, and the show never seems to know how to execute it fully. She’s dime-store Lucy Elfen Lied, and treated about as well by the narrative and her supposed love interest. Speaking of Mike Wheeler, he sets another fun trend for the show going forward— that in a show self-professed about freaks and geeks, it always manages to center the most boiler-plate, white bread, most normal of outcasts in its narrative. Something of a “some freaks are more freakish than others” situation. When the gang get bullied by stock Stephen King sociopaths, Lucas gets insulted for his race and Dustin for his physical condition. Mike? “Frogface”. Yeah, you fucking show that nerd. Never mind that the missing kid actively gets called faggy and queer by other kids and his own dad. This is not present enough in this season to be a problem, but this will soon change.

What is present from the beginning is a staunch artery of misogyny, ubiquitous in how it handles its female characters. I know the Bechdel test is not the be-all end-all to deciding if a work hates women or not, but I am personally sure the name has never crossed either Duffer brothers’ hemispheres even once, and I know this because every single female character fails to pass inspection. Eleven, Nancy, Joyce, and Karen’s plots concern themselves with motherhood, daughterhood, and/or romantic entanglement, invariably with men. To an extent, given this season takes place in 1983, this is to be expected. The show isn’t trying to go for a Bridgerton-esque equal-opportunity whitewash for wish fulfilment purposes. However, while it can easily identify the rote actions of its antagonists as harmful—don’t neg your girlfriend, don’t call people slurs, don’t make kids jump off cliffsides at knifepoint or a psychic girl might telekinetically break your tibia— it never holds a critical lens to its own framing. Eleven is an escaped superpowered psychic child breaking out of a government facility into an even more horrifying prison, 1980s-era American suburbia, and her journey amounts to a banal tale of unexamined assimilationism. She sees the baby pictures of Nancy Wheeler, who’s currently being publicly slut-shamed, and says, “pretty”. When they disguise her in one of Nancy’s old dresses and a suspiciously professional-looking Halloween wig, Mike gawks at her newfound beauty. She asks him if she’s pretty, and he assures her she is. That’s about how deeply the show examines the societal structures of the time period it’s so obsessed with recreating.

I looked to the next season to expand on these feelings. I knew what would happen, kinda; well, actually, as I watched I realized I really didn’t remember much about season 2 at all despite having watched it just the same as season 1. This was the season where Eleven and Hopper had that whole thing, I vaguely remembered liking their dynamic. There was Ghostbusters in this one? It was Halloween-themed, which always made more sense to me than the first season’s Christmas vibe. Thanks to my friends’ warnings, I knew the show really took a nosedive in Season 3, but I held out hope for this next one. There was still time— maybe this one could be good.

Next Chapter