Television was turned upside down on July 15th, 2016, when Netflix quietly debuted a new sci-fi series about a bunch of nerdy kids in a small town in the United States battling a monster inspired by the perennially unfashionable role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
A lot has happened in those nine years. Dungeons & Dragons is no longer quite so uncool. Those kids are now well into early adulthood. And Stranger Things has snatched the baton from Star Wars and Game of Thrones to become the biggest franchise in popular entertainment.
Still, for all that success, the Force is definitely not with Stranger Things as its fifth and final season arrives. Having had a charmed existence through its early years, the show has been dogged by trouble since it signed off on its fourth season, in 2022.
These controversies have taken many forms, from the political to the personal, but together they threaten to puncture the warm bubble of nostalgia about the series’ 1980s setting that is so essential its charms.
RM Block
One of the first big flashpoints was in October 2023, when the actor Noah Schnapp, who plays the teenage serial kidnap victim Will Byers, voiced his support for Israel – eliciting a predictably calm and measured response on social media. Schnapp, who is Jewish, was attacked for stating, “You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.”
A month later he went on Instagram to show off stickers that read “Zionism is sexy” – for which he received further backlash.
Amid rumours that Netflix had put him under pressure to apologise, Schnapp would later clarify his remarks.
“I only want peace, safety, and security for all innocent people affected by this conflict,” he said in a TikTok video shared with his 32 million followers. “I’ve had many open conversations with friends with a Palestinian background, and I think they are very important conversations to have, and I’ve learned a lot.”
Schnapp may have learned something about what the internet does to you when you put your head above the parapet. But did Netflix? It has certainly had its share of teachable moments, with David Harbour – best known for playing the flinty Sheriff Jim Hopper – embarrassing the company with his unwelcome cameo as, it appears, a cheating spouse on Lily Allen’s new tell-all divorce album, West End Girl.
When we started, Netflix was an underdog, we were an underdog, and everyone loves a good underdog story. So it is a strange thing, 10 years later, to be the opposite of that. It’s a little surreal
— Matt & Ross Duffer
He has also been at the centre of bullying accusations made by his costar Millie Bobby Brown – aka the psychic orphan Eleven – who is reported to have filed a formal “harassment and bullying” complaint against Harbour before cameras started rolling on season five.
He obliquely referenced these recent quasi-scandals when the Spanish edition of Esquire magazine asked whether there was anything about his life he would change.
“I would change either everything or nothing,” he said. “You either accept your path completely and realise that even the pain and the slip-ups and the mistakes are all part of the journey, and that there’s truth and growth, wisdom and deeper empathy and connection in all that.”
Rumblings about friction between Brown and Harbour overshadowed the new season’s Los Angeles premiere, on November 6th. Speaking on the red carpet, its producer Shawn Levy did his best to minimise claims of bad blood on set, claiming that reports range from wildly inaccurate to even more inaccurate.
“There’s so much noise around it, but the truth is that we view this crew and this cast as family and so we treat each other with respect, and that’s always been bedrock,” he said.
With the first half of the final season arriving on Wednesday, November 26th – the remaining episodes follow on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve – Netflix will be anxious to learn if any of the negative background noise affects the show.
But the odds are that the series’ global popularity will bulldoze through any controversies involving the cast and crew. In a world where even the most popular franchise can come unstuck – *cough* Star Wars – Stranger Things feels too big to fail.
Too big to fail and too influential to ignore, even if you’re not a fan of kids battling interdimensional monsters. Set in the fictional town of Hawkins in the mid-1980s, the Netflix juggernaut has fuelled an ongoing boom in Ronald Reagan-era nostalgia. As we joined Will, Mike, Dustin and Lucas on their bikes, roving around the suburbs, a new generation discovered the “kids on bikes” genre as created by Steven Spielberg’s ET and Stephen King’s It.
Matt and Ross Duffer, the brothers who created Stranger Things, know how to spin a thrilling tale. That much will be plain to anyone who sat, white-knuckled, through the finale of season four, in which the villainous Vecna tries to open a rift between Hawkins and the hellish pocket universe the kids have dubbed the Upside Down.
But their true talent may lie in their ability to take random strands of 1980s culture and synthesise the mishmash into something cohesive and coherent.
Vecna, for instance, with his deathly gaze and scorched skin, was clearly inspired by Clive Barker’s dimension-hopping S&M enthusiast Pinhead, from the 1987 film Hellraiser. Similarly, the reveal in season three of a secret Russian base beneath Hawkins winked at Red Dawn and other “red panic” films of the 1980s, while the quartet of Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Lucas carries echoes of the preteen protagonists in Spielberg’s 1985 adventure The Goonies.
Even the lexicography is a tribute to the past. The Stranger Things typography that introduces each episode is a take on the distinctive font adorning the 1980s edition of the Stephen King anthology Needful Things.
The chilly synth score, by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, for its part, is a nod toward the retro-future music John Carpenter wrote for movies such as The Thing and Christine (a King adaptation). And that’s without mentioning the references strewn throughout the script to Alien, Altered States, A Nightmare on Elm Street, John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club, Tom Cruise’s breakout Risky Business, The Terminator, Gremlins and Harrison Ford’s Witness.
Nor can we forget the remarkable outbreak of Kate Bush mania among Gen-Zers when her song Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) featured in season four. Though hardly obscure, the tune nonetheless became a global hit all over again, leading Bush to declare that the whole world had gone mad.
Then there’s the Dungeons & Dragons factor. Stranger Things wasn’t the first to use the game – in ET, Elliott and his friends play D&D the night the extraterrestrial arrives on Earth. But Stranger Things made it popular to a degree anyone involved in the hobby would have thought unthinkable.
Just this year the game’s publisher unveiled a “Welcome to the Hellfire Club” edition, named after the gaming group that Mike and Dustin join in high school. On its cover, Stranger Things’ small-town metal headbanger Eddie Munson sits behind his Dungeon Masters screen, arms wide in a welcoming gesture.
There was nothing random about Stranger Things’ championing of Dungeons & Dragons. The Duffer brothers grew up in the 1990s, when their geeky obsessions included making home-made movies and playing the collectable card game Magic: The Gathering. They were outsiders – and Stranger Things was their tribute to weirdos everywhere, as they told me in 2016.
“That was the most autobiographical part of the show,” Matt said. “We played D&D and Magic: The Gathering. That was our obsession, along with video games. There is a lot of us in those characters. We were definitely nerds.”
They were upfront in that interview about setting out to craft a love letter to the movies and books they had grown up adoring. “Steven Spielberg films were huge touchstones for us,” Matt Duffer said. “We wanted to evoke the sense of wonder we remember from our childhood from ET and from Stephen King novels.”
These outsiders are now in charge of one of the biggest franchises in popular entertainment. The irony is not lost on them. “When we started, Netflix was an underdog, we were an underdog, and everyone loves a good underdog story,” they said recently. “So it is a strange thing, 10 years later, to be the opposite of that. It’s a little surreal.”
Geeks were already going mainstream before Stranger Things – look at the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones. But Stranger Things took the trend to another level. Nerd culture wasn’t simply part of the show’s identity but the rocket fuel that powered the entire endeavour.
That journey is coming to an end. Whether the pay-off is worth the long wait since season four remains to be seen. Whatever happens, anyone who has been with the show since 2016 will agree it has been one hell (fire) of a trip. Stranger Things has turned us inside out and upside down – and the best is potentially yet to come.
Stranger Things season five begins on Netflix on Thursday, November 27th. Episodes five to seven debut on St Stephen’s Day, with the finale on New Year’s Day
