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

an object lesson in problems with modern storytelling

the first season was lit like a movie; the fifth was lit like Netflix slop

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 show is about 80s culture! It’s a stake in the heart of the show’s credibility in the one area its creators claim to care about most.

In Season Five, Mike is revealed to be a big Butthole Surfers fan, and Robin knows them sufficiently well to have a strong opinion about them. Which is ludicrous. Where did 16 year old Mike, perhaps the biggest normie in the core cast, learn about the Butthole Surfers in the mid 1980s?!? The Butthole Surfers, prior to the bizarre success of their 1996 hit “Pepper,” weren’t just an indie band, they were one of the most defiantly (and irreverently) outsider bands ever. They used to come out with real guns and fire blanks towards the audience! Frontman Gibby Haynes used to piss into the hole in the bottom of a whiffle ball bat and spray the audience with it. They used to bring boxes of live crickets onto stage and mic them up. I did a little back-of-the-envelope math, admittedly crude, and I believe that the Butthole Surfers may have sold as few as 50,000 albums by 1986, maybe 75,000. That’s despite the fact that the band had been playing, in one form or another, for a decade at that point. And yet they have a big fan in unexceptional 16-year-old high school student Mike Wheeler, who lives in Hawkins, Indiana? It’s ludicrous. If you care about 1980s pop culture, you have to actually care about 1980s pop culture. You have to tell the truth about it. That’s the whole show! Ugh.

And yet I did watch the whole thing. There really was a lot of verve in the show, a sense of energy and an obvious level of craft, at least at the start. Watching the first season back now, I do think it drags somewhat. (I was surprised by just how much time was spent on “Everybody thinks Joyce Byers is crazy and won’t take her seriously” stuff.) But the show looks fantastic, the score is note-perfect, and the young actors generally do a very good job with the material. The monster is sufficiently scary, the evil government figures entertainingly mustache-twirling. The first season really does inspire 80s Stephen King and Steven Spielberg feelings. For a show about alternative dimensions and crazy government conspiracies, Stranger Things felt remarkably self-contained and grounded in its first season. And I love the basic concept: in an effort to develop super soldiers the government subjected a bunch of children to radical experiments to develop psionic abilities, then pushed the most powerful of them to explore another dimension… but she brought something back with her. Awesome, smart premise.

But if you’ve watched the last couple of seasons, you already know the punchline: that cool, uncluttered premise has been thoroughly retconned. Actually, the government had already accessed that alternate dimension years earlier, and actually, their experiments weren’t what created the psionic abilities. No, in fact, the children with psionic powers got them because they received transfusions of magic blood from the first test subject, and he himself got powers because he… took a rock haunted by a demon from a dying scientist he found in a cave while he was a Boy Scout? What? What the fuck is this? In its later seasons, Stranger Things did the worst thing a long-running television show can do: it retroactively made its earlier seasons worse.

That drift from a tight, self-contained, and (in a certain sense) modest story to a sprawling, overcomplicated one that inevitably retconned earlier episodes and invited all manner of plot holes - that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about troubles with modern storytelling. There’s a general drift from clear themes and efficient storytelling towards sprawling, shaggy, seemingly directionless plots that scream “Well, we might as well do this now.” That devolution has happened with all manner of television series and movie franchises. The television version of Westworld is a perfect example. While I wasn’t as big on the first season as its most ardent fans, that season was certainly a remarkable achievement in sharp, inventive, and confident storytelling - in self-contained storytelling. It took place almost entirely within a Western-themed theme park, focusing on the philosophical awakening of “hosts,” that is, androids. There were plenty of mysteries, but they felt smart, intentional. The modesty of the show’s narrative horizons helped keep the focus on what really mattered, which was the enduring question of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be alive.

And then… oof.

By season three and four, Westworld had left the park entirely (literally and symbolically), diving into global AI conspiracies, simulation theory, and convoluted timelines. It was difficult for even devoted fans to tell what was happening from moment to moment in the show. What was once a poignant character study became an impenetrable puzzle that many viewers simply stopped trying to solve. And those core philosophical issues were lost completely in a haze of fan theories, plot digressions, and a mushrooming set of relationships for the show to keep up with. I’ve only ever seen the first episode of The Walking Dead, but many of the show’s viewers have complained about this exact process, where the simplicity of trying to stay alive in a world filled with zombies was lost completed as the writers threw more and more spaghetti at the wall.

The prototypical example among film franchises is the Terminator films. The first is an absolute gem of sci fi storytelling, a poignant time travel story that manages to be deeply sad even in the midst of all of its action. Its sequel executed a perfect pivot to more ordinary bombastic action movie thrills, lightly expanding the scope of the series but largely playing within the boundaries of the original and honoring the first while being a very different movie. And the rest of the franchise is a pile of horrible crap that overcomplicates everything, wastes endless time expanding the “lore,” changes core elements of the original narrative, and shows no interest at all in the core human themes that underlie the masterful originals. Or you might consider the Mission: Impossible series. The original DNA of those movies was tight, tactical spy thrills, spies outthinking spies, but that basic nature has been gradually overwritten by the demands of making every one a maximalist stunt showcase. By the latest films, the Reckoning entries, the narrative had become impossibly unwieldy; the shift from tangible human villains to an abstract, omnipresent AI “Entity” was a perfect symbol for how the franchise lost its way. The runtimes stretched, the “lore” grew, and the cast ballooned to accommodate a growing ensemble of legacy characters. Everything sharp and efficient about those movies was gone.

(For the record I really hate the term “worldbuilding” at this point, with its suggestion that authors have a duty to ponderously build settings and backgrounds that are filled-in and complex for their own sake, rather than simply serving the story, as should always be the goal.)

As is usually the case in these situations, Stranger Things was a victim of its own success. The show was, I believe, originally intended to serve as a limited series - that is, as one that wasn’t going to last beyond one season. The Duffers apparently considered turning it into an anthology, where different characters would populate each season, interacting with the show’s mythology and ideas in different ways. But the first season was a massive hit and cleaned up in awards season, developing a particularly passionate fanbase that demanded more for our intrepid denizens of Hawkins. The Duffers had to find a way to continue the story, and in the process of making more episodes, they gave viewers more of everything: more characters, more plotlines, more monsters, more government shenanigans, more powers for Eleven, more tangled relationships between the core characters, more more more. The (relatively) simple story of these kids trying to find their friend and in so doing helping a girl with magic powers to evade the government and fight the baddies became a massive, endlessly-complex and bloated series, forever mushrooming, picking up more baggage over the course of the seasons like a golden retriever picking up ticks in a field. And they did it all in the internet era, the Twitter era, the Tumblr era, the fans-screaming-at-creators era. They clearly heard the noise; I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall the Duffer Brothers saying that they took online fans and their opinions very seriously. But there are some real negative consequences to that sort of thing.

Take, for example, the show’s giant roster of main characters, which had reached ludicrous levels by the last season. In fiction, you have to add and prune characters as best suits the story; too many characters leads to dividing attention in such a way that leaves all of them underserved. It’s a simple fact that some characters have to function as plot devices and be discarded when no longer useful. Otherwise, you’re left with baggy, distended narratives that feel confused and rushed. The absurd “Justice for Barb” campaign online demonstrates fans influencing fiction in the worst possible way: the Barb character was a complete nothing, a victim for the monster, which is something of a necessity in a show about monsters! She didn’t need “justice,” and in fact could not receive justice, because she’s not a real person. She was a narrative device who served her function. But Barb, though dead, had to be given a whole arc in Season Two, in order to “honor” her. The show did introduce a fun and memorable character in that arc, Murray Baumann, who was a conspiratorial journalist-private investigator hybrid and local crank. I thought he was funny and effective that season. But I was baffled as the show just kept forcing him back into the story after he had obviously outlived his moment. He should have been a one-season side character and then been left behind, having nobly fulfilled his function. But aside from each season’s designated Fallen Hero, invented to make people feel things, nobody on Stranger Things was ever left behind. The roster just grew and grew to a truly ridiculous degree.

In the fourth and penultimate season, you can see the show struggle with this in the Hopper-Joyce-Murray in Russia storyline, which was remarkably unfocused and pointless and existed just to give those characters something to do. Or take the series finale, a two-hour movie-length television episode that features characters repetitively breaking off in pairs to have overwrought conversations so that everyone gets their dramatic moment. It felt like the Duffers had a literal checklist. And that’s just shitty storytelling; I’m sorry to repeat myself, but character beats should emerge organically from the plot and themes of a given work. Here, again, I think I detect the influence of too much attention to fan demands: if you cut a beloved character from your show, their fans online will scream about it. And so in the finale we have the ridiculous spectacle of Murray, a comedy relief side character, blowing up an army helicopter in a moment of physical heroism that’s totally out of keeping with who the character is and what dramatic role he’s served for four seasons. We also have suburban mom Karen Wheeler, totally marginal for most of the series, suddenly given multiple applause moments and tender asides. And then we get the addition of former-infant Holly Wheeler into a core role, the invention of Robin’s girlfriend Vicky (who exists for no story reason whatsoever), annoying meme character Derek…. The Duffers can’t help themselves, it appears. The show ended with platoons of series regulars.

Then there’s the way fan expectations constrain creators. There’s probably no better example of the pernicious influence of fan culture on the show than the characterization of Steve Harrington. Steve’s arc in the first season is genuinely moving, as he goes from being a relentlessly bullying high school alpha dog asshole to a lovable part of the team. The problem is that his character was so lovable that the fans got rabidly attached to him, and so in the show, he simply became more perfect and virtuous over time. No amount of endearing, admirable portrayal was enough for the Steve Harrington fans. This had the effect of making his evolution seem totally implausible; it’s jarring to watch the first season now and see him being a complete dick, given how endlessly kind he became later. And it also undercut the development of the character, in a perverse way: I’m afraid it’s difficult to make endlessly well-meaning and friendly and kind and courageous and virtuous characters interesting, in drama. For most of the series Steve was so cartoonishly good that his character was completely inert. But the Duffers (and Netflix) were clearly afraid of angering his many unhinged fans.

wig budget: $5

There’s also the modern scripted TV reality of giant gaps between seasons. This is obviously not a problem you can pin on the Duffers, although you absolutely can assign some of the blame to Netflix. Stranger Things was particularly cursed in this regard thanks to the influence of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes. Still, it’s tough to watch a show about kids who are clearly no longer kids and teenagers who are in their thirties. It’s also the case that, as human beings, we age at different rates, particularly in Hollywood where there’s so much plastic surgery and fillers and Botox etc. This show in particular was left with a lot of actors who were old enough to rent a car trying to access childlike whimsy by playing characters who were five or seven or ten years younger. And even shows that don’t deal so directly with childhood and youth suffer from modern production schedules. Viewers lose all sense of narrative momentum, the culture changes in a way that makes their themes and interests less relevant, the basic cohesion of the creative process erodes over time. How could a show like The Last of Us, which has released sixteen episodes in a three year period, possibly develop momentum?

Of course, all of this is exacerbated when trying to write as story on the fly, which is what happened to the Duffers after the surprise smash success of the first season. It’s really hard to tell a good story in general; it’s almost impossible to do it when you’re making it up as you go along. Game of Thrones epitomized this condition; the showrunners had to come up with their own ending for an intricate series of novels that took up thousands of pages, and unsurprisingly, they failed. (Again, it’s really hard to come up with a good story even when you know the ending in advance!) And this problem is particularly acute for shows that are based on mystery, fantasy, conspiracy…. The obvious, cliched comparison is Lost, a show that kept layering on more and more and more and then, when it ended, inevitably let fans down, as it had created far too much lore to ever pay it all off. This is why JJ Abrams’s beloved “mystery box” is such a terrible idea for story structure. When a story is built on secrets, writers eventually have to give out some answers or the fans will revolt, but if you explain all the secrets, there’s no show. (What’s in the hatch in Lost? A… room! But don’t worry, here’s more mystery.) And they can’t just have more mysteries, they have to invent bigger mysteries, which often feel less organic and more bolted on than the original premise. That’s what happened to the X Files - every answer had to be followed by a new mystery, leaving fans (like me) perpetually unsatisfied.

Stranger Things was not necessarily a traditional mystery box show, but the final season’s big reveal that “the Upside Down” is actually just a bridge to another other dimension reeks of feeding more big reveals to a voracious audience. I found that particular reveal completely inert, personally, and a further chipping away at the elegance of the original season. It was made worse that the impossibly-annoying character Dustin sold the reveal so hard, saying “We were wrong about the Upside Down… we were so wrong,” a line clearly written for the trailer. But the fans demand more lore! So the basic structure of the universe of the show was massively retconned in order to have a meaningless “revelation.” This problem is particularly derived from Reddit culture, where each show is treated as a puzzle to solve instead of a story, with different Redditors constantly trying to one-up each other with new convoluted theories. This impulse is totally contrary to the basic idea that plot should exist to service emotion, symbol, and theme. But as time goes on, these assumptions about how art works spread.

Serialized storytelling is not easy. I gave up on reading comic books at around 11 years old because I found the annoyances of perpetual storytelling too much to overcome. When stories go on forever, they have no structure. Joel Coen (of the Coen brothers) was once asked about doing TV and said

The thing about TV series that I don’t understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end. But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle — and then they’re beaten to death until they’re exhausted and die. They don’t actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things.

Well said. This fundamental problem only grows with the demands of the entertainment media and fan culture in the 2020s.

I would point out these ongoing structural problems with telling stories in the 21st century, particularly in television but also in big movie franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

1. Starting a serialized story without knowing the ending. This is not a new problem, by any means, but a huge swath of older video media avoided it - television shows were dominantly built on an episodic structure where individual stories would be told in a single episode or over a small number of episodes, and movies were built to be singular entities, with sequels widely understood to be bolted-on cash grabs.

2. Solving every problem with more. When you have to keep coming up with #content, the natural instinct is always to expand - more plot points, more details, more characters, more conflicts, more story. But elegance and restraint are at the heart of effective narrative, and the more you add, the more obligations you have moving forward. Less isn’t always more in the narrative arts, but the disease of more has ruined many serialized stories.

3. Endlessly adding characters and never getting rid of any. Introducing new characters can often seem like a way to solve story problems and freshen up a sagging show or franchise; I understand the temptation. But the more characters you have, the thinner and thinner you end up slicing the audience’s attention, the more relationships you have to juggle, and the more you feel obligated to service characters instead of serving the story.

4. The modern dictates of low episode counts and big gaps between seasons. I don’t want to romanticize the old days of television. I tried to do a rewatch of ER some years back but found it a jarring experience, in part because of how often story elements would appear and then disappear, never to matter again. And the fear the networks had of new viewers finding shows too difficult to follow really limited dramatic potential. But TV had one major advantage: there was so much space to fill in twenty-four or so episodes that there was plenty of time to really develop characters and get the audience invested in them. I’m not a fan of the American Office but you can see how much each character was allowed to grow and change over time, in a way that contributes very much to that show’s enduring popularity. In addition, the regularity of new seasons coming every fall created a rhythm and dependability that made shows themselves feel like friends. (Shows such as Friends.) Now, you might eight get episodes of a “prestige show” and then nothing for three years. That cadence destroys the “shows that feel like your pal” quality that has served TV for decades.

5. Insane fans with way too much influence. To repeat myself for a third time, it’s hard to write a good story, very very hard. And it’s even harder when there’s 10 billion other voices screaming into your head. I would have to write an entire essay on this subject to give it justice, but I’m someone who thinks that fan influence on writers of fiction is just about universally destructive. Stranger Things was situated perfectly to generate a loud, persistent, and sometimes insane fanbase that had all manner of demands about what should happen next. You might consider “Byler,” those fans who “ship” the characters Will and Mike and who reacted to the show’s refusal to provide them with what they wanted with immense angst and vitriol. The Duffers didn’t give in there, but they did with “Justice for Barb,” and television is full of showrunners sweatily catering to people who know nothing about how to tell a good story. I continue to believe that creators and artists of all stripes need to maintain a certain studied disdain for the whims of the audience.

Oh, by the way, you see that header image up there? That’s not really a story problem, and it’s largely a Netflix problem, but it’s growing and drives me crazy. One of the great triumphs of the first season is just how good it looks. It looks, as we used to say, like a movie. Why? Look at the use of shadow, in this scene. Look at the contrasts. Look at the willingness to visually obscure.

Whatever my complaints, this is a show that looks great, that’s moody and atmospheric and has a distinct visual style. Now look at this scene from season five, the parts where the characters are sitting around the D&D table:

Everyone is dead center in the frame, again and again, almost certainly to enable fans to post vertical video clips to Instagram and TikTok. (That sentence depresses me so much.) The faces are all blown out and washed out, with zero shadow, which for the record makes little sense given the layout of the lighting in the room. All of the mood and atmosphere is gone, sacrificed on the altar of Netflix’s terrible cinematography guidelines. The first season of Stranger Things looks like a meticulous labor of love, and its visuals perfectly match with its desire to invoke 80s sci fi and horror. Later seasons are overlit, overly sharp, overly saturated, as well as sterile, flat, and boring. Characters are forever standing in horizontal lines at the exact same depth in camera. And all of that - flat high-key lighting, muted but glossy color grading, shallow depth of field for no cinematic reason, artificial digital sharpness, a total lack of visual inventiveness or risk-taking - it’s all spreading, as the dictates of commerce overwhelm the needs of art. Look at the recent Wicked movies for the example of theatrical films that have embraced blown-out, overlit, composed-for-TikTok visuals. It’s all very depressing. I hate it here.