Hating Stranger Things During the Death Rattle of Criticism

this kind of piece will be criminalized within a year

I hate this fucker so much it’s unreal

Awhile back, Wesley Morris had Kelefa Sanneh on his podcast to talk about Sanneh’s recent New Yorker essay, in which Sanneh wonders where all the negative music criticism has gone, why criticism of contemporary music appears to have dried up. As Sanneh points out, music reviews went from involving of a lot of passionate crankiness and meanspirited takedowns to being among the most tepid and uncontroversial of all culture writing. He names some likely causes, many of which boil down to the fact that the internet is an insane place run by insane people; negative criticism of K-pop essentially doesn’t exist, for example, because K-pop fans are lunatics who will attempt to ruin or end your life if you criticize their favorite artists, and for some reason we tolerate that as a culture. Sanneh goes easier on poptimism than I would, but there is at least some recognition that poptimism is the overarching problem - the directive to give pop music more respect has devolved, in 2025, into a politicized demand that pop music never be criticized at all. It’s a good piece, so check it out if you haven’t.

The podcast conversation includes a lot of great discussion, and a few odd moments. (Morris takes a really gratuitous and unfair swing at Hilton Als, but, you know.) The most glaring thing for me is one that you see often in such discussions: when they do talk about poptimism, Morris and Sanneh turn the conversation immediately to hip hop, almost every time. This is odd - surely poptimism is mostly about pop, not hip hop - but it underlines the animal spirits underneath the debate; hip hop remains cooler than pop music, which is certainly notable in this particular context, and also here the not-entirely-comfortable intersection of racial politics with arts criticism surely plays a role. But mostly, while I enjoyed the conversation and thought it was energizing, I found myself depressed by what didn’t happen: these two professional critics did not, at any point, forcefully defend the idea that negative criticism is valid, important, and necessary in an unqualified way. I kept hoping, but it never happened. And the music media reaction to Sanneh’s essay involved far more fulminating and performative allyship than defenses of negative criticism among the music reviewer class. Those guys just do not want to be the old white guy griping about the shitty music the youths listen to, even though it actually is shitty, and that impulse is the most powerful force in music reviews right now.

This is the world we live in now, where the very existence of negative criticism seems threatened, not long for this world. Every day, professional cultural commentary seems closer and closer to marketing copy, as we slouch deeper and deeper into an era defined by our collective decision that life is too hard and we all should just slip into a warm bath of low standards and perpetual excuses. So often, criticism of any art or media is treated as an assault on the people who like that art and media, despite the fact that an absolutely non-negotiable fact of aesthetic life is that some people are going to hate what you love. That this is a banal and inescapable reality has not stopped many from acting as though the very act of not liking something is an unpardonable assault, though, and if there is one element of contemporary American project that dominates all others, it’s the effort to make everything nice and painless and easy for everyone, all the time. We all seem to have decided that it’s just easier to call everything good, to have zero critical standards, and to take another hit of our drug of choice, whether that’s Xanax or Funko Pop or TikTok or self-help ideology.

It’s in that context, the death of criticism as it’s supposed to exist - as actual criticism - that I listened to this episode of the Ringer podcast The Watch and experienced a kind of soul death. Regular host Chris Ryan welcomes Ringer regular Mallory Rubin, in place of usual cohost Andy Greenwald, who is the closest thing to a hater that website employs, and even he’s the type to laboriously clear his throat and ladle on provisos and qualifications before criticizing anything. Ryan rarely needs much excuse to be positive, and Rubin - well, she’s the kind of person who likes everything and is enthusiastic about everything. I can’t criticize her for that because she’s obviously sincere; I think she’s just wired that way, so I can’t hate on it. But the combination of her relentless positivity and Ryan’s malleability means that the podcast is an hour and ten minutes of Ryan walking up to the edge of offering a criticism and then Rubin then yanking him back from that edge. Ryan tepidly begins with some version of “Hey, maybe one thing that wasn’t perfect was -” and then Rubin says “BUT ACTUALLY, IT WAS PERFECT, BECAUSE….” (Listeners of the Ringer podcast House of R will be familiar with this dynamic.) And at this particular cultural moment, it was all just a little too on the nose as a symbol of how criticism works in the mid-2020s: everyone is just looking for an excuse to like everything. No one wants to hold the bag of disliking something, let alone hating anything.

The Ringer is, in general, a very… accommodating publication when it comes to liking everything. I like the site and I don’t hate that attitude, really, as an editorial ethos, though clearly this is at least partly a matter of playing to their reputation as a very soft landing for celebrities out to promote something. The trouble isn’t that the Ringer or any of its podcasts break very reliably towards going easy on everything; the trouble is that they operate in a professional critical culture where there is essentially and increasingly nothing else but forced positivity and jocular inoffensiveness. I wouldn’t mind the existence of fanboying on podcasts if I felt like that was the exception instead of the norm.

Luckily, your host here is a lifelong and dedicated hater. I understand that without the statement “this is bad,” the statement “this is good” has no meaning. And I’m perfect willing to say to all of the angry fanboys out there, directly: Stranger Things is a bad show. Indeed, I think it’s a positively awful show, mawkish and clumsy, totally inconsistent with its own clownish mythology, motivated by a plainly false vision of American social life, dependent on references so meaningless they’d make Deadpool & Wolverine blush, driven by plot contrivance and convenience at every stage, expressed in an endlessly-annoying pantomime of clever banter, and possessed of a totally unearned belief in its own gravitas. I am absolutely sick to death of these annoying, self-lionizing characters who battle Vaktar in the Oopsie Doosie. And if things continue on their current trajectory, in our society, sharing such negative thoughts might soon result in a lengthy prison sentence or literal crucifixion. So let me take this opportunity to say, contra Rubin and Ryan, why I think Stranger Things and the first four episodes of its final season suck. Here’s an abbreviated list of my complaints.

• What would it take, do you think, for people to admit that the “nerds” have won? What level of totalizing cultural, social, professional, and economic victory would be required before the nerds started to ask themselves hard questions about whether they’re really so marginalized? They really underline the whole “nerds are the downtrodden saints of suburbia” shtick, in season five, with condescending asshole Dustin involved in a pointless and stupid dick-measuring contest with over-the-top jock stereotypes, a plotline that ensures everyone knows nerds are good and everyone else is bad. That element has always been potent in Stranger Things, but at this point it’s not just stale, it approaches the grotesque. In 2025, nerds are not the bullied kids hiding in basements - they are the ones who own the basements, the houses above them, and the streaming platforms that beam this cosplay of victimhood into your living room. Silicon Valley billionaires, Marvel’s endless nerd-baiting franchises, the algorithmic chokehold of tech monopolies, the cultural hegemony of Comic-Con aesthetics, even total control of sports franchise front offices and the analysis of those sports…. Nerds are not marginalized in 2025! We live under the thumb of the ever-growing nerd empire! To keep portraying nerds as lovable outsiders is to watch the new aristocracy spike the football over and over again, insisting they’re still scrappy underdogs while they dictate the terms of our economy and our imagination. It’s ugly and it’s dishonest. Nerds are the new bullies, and Stranger Things is their victory parade, disguised as nostalgia for a false past. Yes, I understand that the show takes place in the 1980s. But, for one, I think a lot of nerd mythology about the past is just that - everyone who complains that the kids at school made fun of their Star Wars lunchbox is ignoring the fact that everyone had a Star Wars lunchbox in the 1980s, I was there, those were the biggest movies of all time! and two, the show might depict the 1980s but it’s being released in the 2020s, and I just don’t see any more utility in the never-ending quest to prove that nerds are better than everyone else.

• Speaking of: if you put a snake in somebody’s locker, you can’t complain when they beat your ass. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

• Throughout the first four episodes, our intrepid team is seen using walkie talkies with great abandon, including across implausible distances. (And, literally, into another dimension.) They do this despite the fact that such transmissions are unsecured and could be intercepted by anyone, such as the United States military, who would surely be actively trying to intercept such transmissions. Given that this is true… why go through the whole “coded message on the community radio station” charade? Let’s set aside the fact that there’s no explanation whatsoever for how a couple of 20-year-olds with no experience in broadcast media got to run the town’s radio station. (Let’s also set aside why podunk Hawkins, Indiana has a radio station at all.) Maybe all the older DJs fell into the hellmouth or whatever. Within minutes of Robin sending the code out over the radio, they’re all on the walkie talkies talking about what she just said! So why on earth do you need to go through the charade of sending a coded message over the radio at all?? I know - because they Duffer Brothers thought that would be a cool scene. Well, congratulations, you got your coded message, and then minutes later you got the exact same characters talking about the coded message over walkie talkies.

• Look, we all have to suspend disbelief in certain situations. That a “demogorgon” can withstand twenty soldiers shooting it directly with assault rifles but be battled to a standstill by a middle-aged mother with a wine bottle, you know, that’s just the stuff of fiction. But when you have this whole overlong sequence where your heroes attack, drug, and terrorize a family in a way that appears to be exactly the opposite of heroic, and then just leave the rest of the family tied up in a fucking barn without explanation, I’m going to throw the flag there. The military base in the Upside Down makes no sense. Mike and Nancy come up with a plan to distract the nurse to talk directly to their mom, then we cut to them talking to the very doctor they said they were trying to avoid. Also…nobody was saying “benzos” in 1987, guys! They’d refer to Valium or to downers, sure, but I promise multiple teenaged characters would not be talking about “benzos.” And, yeah, whatever, small stakes in a fantasy show. But if you’re going to go on and on about how important period detail is to your show, maybe you should get it right.

• For example. The Duffer Brothers posture as curators of 1980s pop culture, but whenever it would be cooler to misrepresent that past, they do. Their decision to make the character Max, a 14‑year‑old trailer‑park kid in Indiana, be obsessed with Kate Bush is laughable. Though a huge hit in her native UK, in the actual 1980s, in the United States, Kate Bush was a niche act, relegated to college radio and art‑school circles, not the soundtrack of Midwestern adolescence. She simply didn’t receive the kind of mainstream radio airplay in the American heartland that would have made it remotely plausible for such a character to fall in love with. If they wanted to be rigorous about 1980s pop culture (the thing they claim to care about above all else), they would have saddled Max with a love of Wham! or Huey Lewis, acts that genuinely saturated the airwaves of small‑town America. But Wham! isn’t cool to 21st‑century ears, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-go” isn’t dramatic enough for the story they wanted to tell, so they rewrote history to flatter contemporary taste, bending plausibility into a hipster fantasy. That choice betrays their supposed reverence for the decade: they don’t care about the real 1980s, only their idealized version, a curated museum of retro chic where authenticity is sacrificed for TikTok virality.

• Speaking of which - you know, a few years ago, if you had said to me “You’re going to come to hate a particular song on Hounds of Love, thanks to its use in a particularly terrible television program,” I would have told you that you were nuts. I would have kicked you out of my house. I would have said that’s impossible! And yet here I am, clicking whatever button I can on whatever streaming service I use to ensure that I never have to hear “Running Up That Hill” again. Congratulations.

• Hey, did you see that Robin said “Great Scott!”??? Remember how Doc Brown used to say “Great Scott!” in Back to the Future??? ‘memba? Why is this meaningful? How does this reference connect the themes and artistry of Stranger Things to those of Back to the Future? Well, it doesn’t, in common with both this show and all of the reference art that has become so dominant in popular culture. Ready Player One, Spiderman: No Way Home, The Flash, Deadpool & Wolverine… each of these demonstrate that “fandom” is an incredibly cheap date that will reliably point at the screen and say “Ooh, ’memba? ’memba that? ’memba Back to the Future? I ‘memba!” if you dangle references in front of them. No one gives a single rat’s fucking ass about Jamie Foxx’s Electro in the truly awful Amazing Spider-man 2, a nothing character in a hideously overstuffed franchise-building exercise in an obligatory sequel that was as cynical as movie-making gets. But you ’memba him! So you cheer when he comes on. Why is Eleven dressed as Josh Brolin from Goonies this season? For no reason at all, obviously, literally no deeper reason. But you ’memba Goonies, if you’re part of the Stranger Things core audience! Just like last season, when there was a character named Argyle for absolutely no artistically meaningful purpose. Artistic purpose wasn’t the point; the point is that you ’memba Argyle from Die Hard, and that makes your brain fire and you go “oooh.” And that’s this entire fucking show. That’s all it’s got. It’s a parade of absolutely empty references for the dumbest fucking people alive to coo and clap to. Congratulations.

• Robin, for the record, is a perfect example of how attempting to pander to a given audience results in characters who are dehumanized and flattened - because Stranger Things has such an aggressive band of LGBTQ fans, Robin can’t just be gay, she has to be gay and perpetually omni-quirky and a font of wisdom and a perfect friend. Why risk pissing off the most loyal foot soldiers in the fanbase? Likewise, the character of Erica, little sister to series regular Lucas, is an absolutely perfect example of how white writers rooms portray Black women characters: literally every word out of her mouth is some sort of sassy one-liner. All of them! I defy you to find one line from that character, in three seasons, which is not a mouthy, uber-confident little bon mot. She’s never vulnerable, never scared, never wrong, never mistaken, which of course means that she’s never allowed to be human. White dudes write Black women as relentless put-down machines because they think that signals strength, but of course fully-developed characters aren’t always strong. Black women and gay women and all sorts of characters should get to be flawed, as all human beings are, but showrunners who fear backlash can’t permit that.

• It’s crazy that the gang somehow found a way to travel through time so that Eleven could get some distractingly unnatural-looking lip filler. Surprised they didn’t choose to dramatize that particular adventure.

• Holy fuck, there are too many characters in this show! HOLY FUCK. Trim your roster please! Stranger Things now resembles less a TV show than a small Midwestern census bureau, with characters multiplying like rabbits and refusing to die off. We’ve got Eleven, Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin, Max, Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, Robin, Hopper, Joyce, Murray, Erica, Mike’s mom, Mike’s dad, Mike’s sister, the science teacher, this or that army officer, Matthew Modine’s perpetually disappearing-and-reappearing bad guy, Eleven’s mom, Eleven’s “sister,” the new hideously annoying fat kid they insist on stuffing down our throats, and that’s before you even get to the various Russian side plots or the endless parade of Hawkins residents who exist only to look confused. It’s like the writers are terrified of firing anyone, other than the little roster of redshirts they keep adding and killing off each season to provoke cheap dramatic moments, so instead of trimming the fat they just keep adding more meat until the narrative resembles a Golden Corral buffet - bloated, overstuffed, and impossible to digest. By season four, you need a flowchart just to remember who’s in which dimension, and by season five, you half expect Netflix to start issuing trading cards so viewers can keep track of the roster. Why is Murray Bauman in this season? What is he really adding, narratively? Nothing, beyond another guy to ’memba.

• I really, really hate fake reveals, which is to say, reveals where there was never any chance that it was going to be anyone other than the character you knew was coming. In this season’s first four episodes, we get this ponderous reveal of Mr. Whatsit, which is a reference to the A Wrinkle in Time series. (That series is an absolutely terrible fit with the Stephen King-Amblin Entertainment ethos of this show, just totally incongruous and mismatched if you’ve ever actually read and loved the book, but nevermind.) Here’s the thing: there’s just literally no one else it could be but Henry/Vecna, the big-bad they artlessly waged into the show in the previous season. Like… literally no one else. Who else is it going to be??? Fucking of course, it’s Vecna! What other option was there? Mr. Whatsit was going to turn out to be the ghost of Bob from season two? What are we doing here? What is the purpose of this tiresome charade?

• I love Linda Hamilton. Love her! The way she embody a soft, relatable everywoman in Terminator and then became a hardened superhero psycho in the sequel, I’ll never forget it. And you know want to know something? She’s awful in this. Awful! Terrible line delivery throughout. I’m guessing because she has to perform everything in some terrible greenscreen nightmare where there are no real objects and no real humans around her.

• Hey, it’s cool how our heroes Eleven and Hopper feel absolutely zero compunction against committing casual torture and murder of soldiers! We had previously established that Hopper was a soldier himself, and had some sympathies for his fellow grunts, but nevermind. I like seeing him be an implausibly-effective 80s action hero badass all the time. Really fits well with the “small town characters you can relate to” vibe. More lighthearted shows for children (who don’t mind seeing living human bodies be horrifically mangled by an extradimensional mind wizard) should have characters with absolutely no moral compass.

• Show looks like shit, obviously. It didn’t used to! The first season was actually really visually distinct, looked like serious business, looked like a movie. These episodes? They have all of the awful Netflix lighting and terrible flat composition we’ve come to expect, CGI that looks rushed despite the fact that it’s been 18 years since the last season, no sense of visual depth or style, no meaningful shadows anywhere, stuffed full of awful swirling “fantasy” visuals that amount to laziness on the part of the viz effects team….

• Hey, did you know that the characters in Stranger Things make a lot of plans? Like, a lot of fucking plans? The first four episodes of this season play less like a supernatural thriller and more like a community theater workshop on how to over-explain nonsense: every scene is just another character breathlessly unveiling a labyrinthine plan that sounds like it was drafted by a conspiracy theorist with a corkboard fetish. You can practically hear the writers cackling as they stack plans like Jenga blocks - “First we lure Vecna into the Upside Down using a cassette tape of Kate Bush, then we triangulate his psychic frequency with Dustin’s walkie-talkie, then we blast him with the power of friendship and childlike wonder, but only if Eleven remembers her trauma in the exact right order and raises her hand in just the right way.” There’s no suspense. It’s a kind of overexplained plan Mad Libs that gives me a migraine, and the show has become even more of a parody of itself as characters endlessly narrate strategies so convoluted they collapse under their own weight. I thought these were supposed to be regular people! I thought that was kind of the point, right? But every single character can reliably be counted on to become a Rambo-Robocop type with impossible martial skills when needed. Whatever sense of ordinary kids discovering a fantasy world has given way to every character being John McClane on Christmas whenever the writers want them to be, because why not?

• Fuck Noah Schnapp.

• Speaking of, holy Christ, how long are you going to drag out the “Will Byers coming out of the closet” arc??? You’ve been wildly waving your arms, saying “HEY THIS KID’S GAY EVERYONE, DID YOU CATCH THAT HE’S GAY, HEY EVERYONE HE’S GAY” for season after season without actually saying it. The show has turned his coming out arc into a masterclass in cynical narrative stalling, dragging his obvious gay identity across multiple seasons like a carrot dangled for cheap sentiment rather than authentic storytelling. Instead of giving the character the dignity of clarity, the writers milk ambiguity for maximum melodrama, wringing out teary monologues and furtive glances as if they were rationing representation for sweeps week. It’s certainly not bravery, not in 2025; instead, it’s the most cynical pandering imaginable, stretching the inevitable reveal into a multi-year cliffhanger designed to keep the LGBTQ fanbase hooked while pretending the show is doing something profound. The result feels less like genuine character development and more like a calculated marketing strategy, exploiting identity for drama points. EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THAT HE’S GAY, PLEASE JUST GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY.

• This season has some really intense Rise of Skywalker resonances, and I don’t need to tell you that you really don’t want to invite that comparison. First reason: we are really in the world of “our supernatural character has whatever powers we want her to have to serve the story” here. Eleven can suddenly jump real high, I guess? Where did that come from? How does that connect to past portrayals? And she can interrogate a soldier with her telepathy, now, somehow, for some reason. It’s all very “Jedi can suddenly do Force healing now because we wrote ourselves into a corner” stuff. Also, this season shares the awful overdetermined A to B to C plot of Rise of Skywalker: everything in this is season is some version of “We gotta go to place A, to get thing B, to find villain C, but first we gotta find thing X, to reveal location Y, where we’ll meet character Z….” This is why characters are always just shouting plans at each other, because the writers are afraid that the audience is going to forget that they need to find the Sith knife left behind by Oochi so that they can find the remnants of the Death Star, which didn’t actually blow up into a billion tiny pieces as we directly saw in an earlier movie and somehow landed in such a way that if our protagonist stands at the exact right spot (completely randomly) and holds it up, she’ll find the wayfarer that leads to the planet Nebulon where Palpatine is hiding six million Star Destroyers…. You get my point. Plots that amount to a series of fetch quests lead to characters relentlessly shouting exposition at each other, and that’s this show now.

  

• These characters are canonically 20 years old.

• I have no fucking idea what’s going on in Vecna’s mind cave or whatever with the redhead and the sister who was a toddler fifteen minutes ago, neither do you, and neither do the writers. It’s the purest form of “we need to give these characters something to do, better put them in some sort of gulch in Arizona that really only exists within the Trauma Castle of the villain.” They’re just getting stashed somewhere until they’re useful again, which will assuredly involve playing “Running Up That Hill” a few more times. Ugh.

• The way these people talk to each other makes my skin crawl. All they do is heap blank derision and ugly irony at each other, all the time, affecting the most demeaning, shit-eating superiority possible. In season five Stranger Things has devolved into a marathon of affected hyper-sarcasm, where every exchange sounds like teenagers auditioning for the role of “Most Condescending Ironist in Hawkins.” Instead of dialogue that advances plot or deepens character, we get endless volleys of smirking one-liners, dripping with faux-clever disdain, as if the cast were trapped in a competition to see who can weaponize irony most lethally. It’s less conversation than some sort of toxic performance art, a parody of a parody of 80s-movie one-liners that lack any of the wit, energy, or plot sense of the real thing. That’s what this show is, now, characters sneering at each other with the kind of exaggerated sarcasm that feels rehearsed, hollow, and exhausting, like watching a high school debate team mistake snark for substance. It doesn’t surprise me that David Harbour was allegedly investigated for being verbally abusive to Milly Bobby Brown; the tone of this thing is such a goddamn nightmare, I’d believe any kind of on-set abuse you alleged.

• But remember, guys, friendship is the real magic.

In the episode of The Watch, Ryan recounts how he watched these four episodes with a couple of literal children over the Thanksgiving holiday, and this compelled him to overlook any of the show’s flaws that might ordinarily occur to him. And there’s something sweet about that, honestly, there really is. But this, to me, is a symbol of where cultural commentary is in 2025, why there will soon be nothing but advertising and #content that’s indistinguishable from it: we are all of us, metaphorically, taking in all of the art we enjoy in the presence of a child, a kid that we don’t want to disillusion or hurt, so we just accept every flaw, ignore every problem, and eat our slop. That’s criticism, today, that’s what our culture industry has become. We’re all constantly held hostage by the most unhinged hysterics on social media, who will dox anyone who criticizes their show and wish suicide on anyone who gives their favorite popstar a B- on their latest album. The palpable fear that Morris and Sanneh feel, sitting at the absolute commanding heights of prestige media arts coverage, falls over all of us. No one feels comfortable being the asshole. No one wants to be perceived to be a hater. And so all critical conversations become like the one between Ryan and Rubin: our vestigial desire to criticize expressed half-heartedly and from a place of fear, always ready to be turned into more strained praise, met at every turn by someone telling us that, actually, there isn’t anything to criticize at all.