When Stranger Things first hit Netflix in the summer of 2016, it felt like lightning in a bottle.
It came out during an important stretch in my life, the summer that my wife and I decided to move from Los Angeles to Seattle. That era took on an exciting, slightly scary, and “all of these circumstances had to fall together just right” for it to really happen at all. We did make the move that fall as it turns out, and it’s one of the best decisions that we ever made.
We watched the hell out of Stranger Things Season 1 that summer while visiting friends in Seattle who actively recruited us to make the move, and while discussing which neighborhoods we wanted to check out and potentially settle down in, how our respective work situations would shake out, and so on.
Stranger Things falls right into a sweet spot of the kind of show both my wife and I are poised to enjoy: deep Gen X nostalgia for the ‘80s, and a genre show that expertly meshed great writing and performances with creepy-cool storytelling that balanced by never tipping too far into camp or gore.
I’ve rewatched the first season a few times since 2016, and it always holds up exceptionally well. Sadly, I can’t say the same for Seasons 2 through 4, though. They’re not bad seasons of television, but I can’t say that they’re necessarily all that good, either.
Making TV is hard, and sustaining a good TV show over time is even harder. In the case of Stranger Things, I think the massive and mostly unexpected supernova of popularity of Season 1 led to a bigger budget and the ambition to tell an even “bigger” story in future stories.
Therein lies the problem. The magic of Season 1 was not in its monsters or CGI; it was in its characters – the kids, the teens, and the adults – trying to navigate some very stranger things going on, indeed, while also trying to navigate the regularness of life, as Chrissie Moltisanti might say. Getting away from that meant drifting away from the formula.
As a completist and TV nerd, of course I’m going to watch Season 5 through to the series finale, even in knowing that most of its eight episodes run over an hour, with Episode 8, “The Rightside Up,” running a full two hours.
Even the Stranger Things Season 5 trailer runs an oversized three minutes, and as expected it promises CGI-heavy action set pieces on the way to resolving its story of good versus evil. In fact, it almost has kind of a Christopher Nolan vibe to it, for better or worse. Here’s hoping there’s still room for a few small, human moments amid the chaos.
Stranger Things Season 5 will be released in three chunks, which are referred to as “volumes.” Volume 1, containing the first four episodes, will be released on November 26th, 2025, with Volume 2’s chunk of four coming out on December 25th, and then finally “The Rightside Up” is strategically being made available on New Year’s Eve day, December 31st.