Ha...that was a rant worth reading! So I read it twice. I actually liked Season 4 despite the issues you colorfully and hilariously outlined, and look forward to Season 5.
Enjoyed this one very much and I look forward to the next rant on whichever subject moves you to offer one!
I felt like in the first season the 80s thing was just there to explain how the kids could be constantly out of contact with their parents, but yeah then they leaned into it so hard...
I still like seasons 1 and 2. Well, except for the episode we don't talk about, anyway.
Interesting observation! They say the reason the parents need to die in a Disney movie is none of the plots would make sense if they were around. I wonder if screen writers will increasingly set stories in the pre-smartphone era as it’s hard to film real life now as so much “conversation” occurs via text message. Not to mention plot tension when everyone is always in instant contact with each other.
I think we’re going to end up with screenwriters just sort of pretending these things don’t exist and just ask for suspension of disbelief. Not everything can be set in the 30s or in a desert with no cell phone coverage. I don’t see any way to work cell phones/texting into tv and movies and keep it interesting
It's been handled in plenty of movies. They simply put less focus on it than people do in reality. They show a few tweets, a few texts, and that stands in for the norm of society while the movie focuses on things that are most interesting in a movie: spoken dialog and emotional expression.
I think a lot of your criticisms would have been tempered by more financial and time restraints. There are too many superfluous scenes. Having to edit down to 45 minutes per episode along with having to refrain from shooting certain scenes due to budgetary constraints would have led to a tighter story.
Most definitely. Limitation breeds creativity by enforcing self-editing. It's been a boon to me in poetry for years; my best work lives within highly-structured forms. Limitations force you to think through the ideas and how you express them. Aside from the benefit of thinking about your ideas from multiple sides to see how to fit the form (and sometimes choosing form based on ideas), it's also harder to "keep" your precious-but-not-very-good expressions when you'd have to work way harder to do so, or to remove something truly essential to keep them.
Now this is the kind of white hot, over the top rant that I pay my money for.
Honestly, I have no idea about most of these references because I only watched the first season of Stranger Things. I liked it well enough, but I felt one season of the show was all that I really needed.
Agree with much here. What I don't understand though is how this season was what drove you to dislike the show. This season is the best season since the first one. It's a solid B. The other seasons are absolutely terrible, I mean, The Room levels of bad, straight Fs. The entire bully plotline of Season 3 generated laughable scene after laughable scene. The flesh monster? Nothing made any sense. Eleven's terrible attempt at a spin-off in Chicago? That was bad television, truly bad television. This season is about where I would expect a TV show to be after four seasons, which is not very good but at least watchable without cringing.
The latest season put me off because it’s too dark. There was some tongue and cheek in previous seasons but comes across like they are starting to take themselves too seriously.
I'll say that I was surprisingly affected by Will's arc. The fact it is so aggressively in the 80s makes this hit harder - I totally get why Will is terrified to say the words "I'm gay." I thought it worked really well for him to have his heart-to-heart with Jonathan but still not manage to get the words out. And though it's obvious to us, I'm not actually sure whether Jonathan has figured it out for himself yet (especially since gay representation wasn't exactly great in the 80s).
I went into these last couple episodes rolling my eyes a bit at the queer-baiting, but I think they managed to make something interesting and effective out of it. YMMV as always though.
I couldn’t finish your article because I’m not even halfway done with the season, but yeah. These problems have been present since season 1 in nascent form. They were just hidden because of the show’s novelty.
But my wife loves it, so we’re watching it, even if she has to sometimes put up with “why is he STILL TRAPPED IN RUSSIA” comments from me. Seriously, that should have been two episodes max.
Anyway, two words: Peaky Blinders. We just started it and I’m ready to design a time machine so I can become a WWI veteran-with PTSD-cum-proto-gangster in London just because that dude played the Scarecrow is terrific and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds deserve more attention. Plus the accents remain awesome. Though it’ll have to wait for me to finish being a rancher in Montana.
Don’t forget about their pathetic attempt to make Mike seem more useful/important: “you’re the heart of this group, Mike! & without heart, we’ll fall apart” 🤢
The response to this show makes me feel like a crazy person. I couldn't finish the first season for a lot of reasons (the lack of subtlety was difficult to stomach), but the big one was how they wasted Winona Ryder by writing her as the most flat character in the history of TV - every scene was her hysterically crying. I fast forwarded through all of her supposedly deeply emotional scenes because it made me cringe or laugh. I've been completely shocked that such a large amount of people have stuck with it for this many years.
Also, the kids suck at acting (at least they did at the time). Scenes flowed like a film school project with a $100 million budget.
There was also no tension whatsoever to Rider's hysterical flailing after, what, the first episode? Because the audience finds out that Will is alive loooooong before his mom does. I'm normally a big fan of dramatic irony, but the Duffers managed to use it there to gut the drama.
Freddie... you’re not wrong on any of these points, but come on.
The show started as a genre tribute show, but it’s not that anymore.
It’s a thrill ride now.
And a pretty well made thrill ride!
Sure, you don’t have to look very hard to see the gears of that thrill ride that sometimes cynically and sometimes nonsensically turning to keep the whole operation running, but in the end it delivers on its promise to have suspense, mystery and action that appeals to a mass audience.
And mass appeal isn’t in itself proof of worthiness, but I really do like that it’s a show that I watch, my wife watches, my kids watch, their friends watch, the people at my gym watch... and we can make small talk about. There are very few movies/shows that are like that anymore.
But this is my problem: thrill rides aren't meant to be dozens of hours long. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark be better if it was as long as this last season of Stranger Things?
But it’s a pretty good comp, because Raiders is a tribute to the serials that did the thing that Stranger Things is trying to do: you buy a ticket, ride the roller coaster for a bit then get dropped off at the same place you started, without the characters changing too much. And serials are made to just keep repeating the formula for as long as people are still buying the ticket.
I think good stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and the problem with modern Hollywood and its franchise obsession is that nothing is allowed to end. This show is a perfect example. I could easily envision a good two-hour movie and good two-hour sequel based on these characters and themes and plot points. But there's, what, 40 hours of this show now? It doesn't have the bones to sustain that.
That's been one of the criticisms leveled at Western super hero comic books for years. By contrast Japanese manga tell a self contained story with a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end that allows for a traditional dramatic story telling arc.
Comic books, by contrast, just go on and on and on like soap operas for the geeky set. The infiltration of that kind of story telling into mainstream movie making with the popular success of the superhero genre is probably not a positive development.
"[The lack of a beginning, middle, ending has] been one of the criticisms leveled at Western super hero comic books for years."
Indeed. It's why we just keep getting reboots. It's why superhero-type comic books get alternative universe cycles and why all the superhero comic books eventually jump the shark: they are built on mechanics of increasing stakes, and superheroes all eventually reach world-level stakes (or higher), and you can only do that so much before entering the realm of the absurd. This is a feature of their model: they find it difficult to be truly "episodic" which in theory one can do over and over again, but their business model involves continuing to sell the popular superheroes because they make money. Developing new comics is hard and risky by comparison.
"By contrast Japanese manga tell a self contained story with a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end that allows for a traditional dramatic story telling arc."
I'm a bit leery of this. Not that manga has these neverending series that get constantly redone; I'm not aware of that sort of thing in manga (though it may exist outside my knowledge; I'm no manga expert); rather, if you look at the "graphic novel" aspect of comics, those typically have that same kind of beginning - middle - end structure you see in most manga. Comics just seem to inhabit the same universes and reuse the same characters over and over again. (One could argue that a lot of manga does the same, but merely calls the characters different names and uses different art. I'll leave it to someone else to decide how different that really is.)
There are definitely interesting parallels to be drawn between pop culture narratives and commedia dell'arte. Deploying types instead of characters in fiction has its advantages in putting the consumer on familiar ground almost instantly. I suspect that "Stranger Things" is guilty of this given Mr. deBoer's post and the comments here.
But if you are going to argue that 90% of comics (or movies, or novels, or whatever) are derivative that implies that there is a 10% that is more exceptional. There are reboots eager to trot out the same tired clichés in place of well rounded characters but there are also works like "The Watchmen" that are intent on exploring and subverting those old tropes.
One of the best examples of this, imo, is the massive difference in quality between Torchwood: Children of Earth and Torchwood: Miracle Day. They are a couple of years apart and Children was made in England, 5 episodes only but quite possibly one of the best series I have ever seen: the simplicity and economy with which they tell the story is what makes it so fantastic. Fast forward to Miracle Day, produced by the ScyFy (sic?) channel in the US, what clearly should have been 5 episodes was stretched to an unbearable 12 episodes. Fucking horrendous and what an ignominious way to end a franchise
Yes! 2 hour thrill ride- that what movies are for now. Serials need both story and great dialog - if the subject (period pieces IMO) is something you don't care about then the acting has to be great.
This gets to a formula I used to hear about in Hollywood. Nick Stevens at UTA was the first guy who said it to me. Brad Grey later said same thing. People will watch a show or movie about them (a mirror) with just an accurate story. A baseball movie with bad acting and dialog? Baseball players will watch it. If you want to broaden its success, writing dialog is harder but cheaper to do. If you get all three you have Field of Dreams.
Freddie, IDEA FOR YOU, a guy I know wrote a graphic novel about making of The Godfather (he hired an artist) so that he could pitch it to studios- it's now on Paramount+ "The Offer" - it's really great. The graphic novel gets the storyboards done, so it's easier to get optioned and made.
"Unfortunately the characters of Stranger Things don’t really have personalities beyond trauma, consumer choices, and sexual preference."
Freaking awesome.
Very appropriate for our time, then!
So, like, most people today?
Unfortunately.
Lol
It's funny because I think you could argue that Barb was more developed than any of the main characters on Stranger Things (in S1).
I'd imagine making those inferences is a big part of the fun.
I wore my dissertation on her glasses.
Man, this is so deeply, deeply true of fandom.
Who is Barb?
But they actually had the creators bending the second season to their will! The Duffer Brothers said so!
Ha...that was a rant worth reading! So I read it twice. I actually liked Season 4 despite the issues you colorfully and hilariously outlined, and look forward to Season 5.
Enjoyed this one very much and I look forward to the next rant on whichever subject moves you to offer one!
I felt like in the first season the 80s thing was just there to explain how the kids could be constantly out of contact with their parents, but yeah then they leaned into it so hard...
I still like seasons 1 and 2. Well, except for the episode we don't talk about, anyway.
Interesting observation! They say the reason the parents need to die in a Disney movie is none of the plots would make sense if they were around. I wonder if screen writers will increasingly set stories in the pre-smartphone era as it’s hard to film real life now as so much “conversation” occurs via text message. Not to mention plot tension when everyone is always in instant contact with each other.
yes.
I think we’re going to end up with screenwriters just sort of pretending these things don’t exist and just ask for suspension of disbelief. Not everything can be set in the 30s or in a desert with no cell phone coverage. I don’t see any way to work cell phones/texting into tv and movies and keep it interesting
It's been handled in plenty of movies. They simply put less focus on it than people do in reality. They show a few tweets, a few texts, and that stands in for the norm of society while the movie focuses on things that are most interesting in a movie: spoken dialog and emotional expression.
What episode don’t we talk about?
I think the one where El goes to Philly and gets a new outfit.
I think a lot of your criticisms would have been tempered by more financial and time restraints. There are too many superfluous scenes. Having to edit down to 45 minutes per episode along with having to refrain from shooting certain scenes due to budgetary constraints would have led to a tighter story.
Exactly so. It's Netflix's biggest darling and so they have no constraints and thus no need for efficiency and purpose.
Most definitely. Limitation breeds creativity by enforcing self-editing. It's been a boon to me in poetry for years; my best work lives within highly-structured forms. Limitations force you to think through the ideas and how you express them. Aside from the benefit of thinking about your ideas from multiple sides to see how to fit the form (and sometimes choosing form based on ideas), it's also harder to "keep" your precious-but-not-very-good expressions when you'd have to work way harder to do so, or to remove something truly essential to keep them.
I've never seen the show, and after reading this, I think I'm going to continue not watching the show.
Now this is the kind of white hot, over the top rant that I pay my money for.
Honestly, I have no idea about most of these references because I only watched the first season of Stranger Things. I liked it well enough, but I felt one season of the show was all that I really needed.
Agree with much here. What I don't understand though is how this season was what drove you to dislike the show. This season is the best season since the first one. It's a solid B. The other seasons are absolutely terrible, I mean, The Room levels of bad, straight Fs. The entire bully plotline of Season 3 generated laughable scene after laughable scene. The flesh monster? Nothing made any sense. Eleven's terrible attempt at a spin-off in Chicago? That was bad television, truly bad television. This season is about where I would expect a TV show to be after four seasons, which is not very good but at least watchable without cringing.
I forgot about the Chicago spin-off. Oh god!
The latest season put me off because it’s too dark. There was some tongue and cheek in previous seasons but comes across like they are starting to take themselves too seriously.
I'll say that I was surprisingly affected by Will's arc. The fact it is so aggressively in the 80s makes this hit harder - I totally get why Will is terrified to say the words "I'm gay." I thought it worked really well for him to have his heart-to-heart with Jonathan but still not manage to get the words out. And though it's obvious to us, I'm not actually sure whether Jonathan has figured it out for himself yet (especially since gay representation wasn't exactly great in the 80s).
I went into these last couple episodes rolling my eyes a bit at the queer-baiting, but I think they managed to make something interesting and effective out of it. YMMV as always though.
I couldn’t finish your article because I’m not even halfway done with the season, but yeah. These problems have been present since season 1 in nascent form. They were just hidden because of the show’s novelty.
But my wife loves it, so we’re watching it, even if she has to sometimes put up with “why is he STILL TRAPPED IN RUSSIA” comments from me. Seriously, that should have been two episodes max.
Anyway, two words: Peaky Blinders. We just started it and I’m ready to design a time machine so I can become a WWI veteran-with PTSD-cum-proto-gangster in London just because that dude played the Scarecrow is terrific and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds deserve more attention. Plus the accents remain awesome. Though it’ll have to wait for me to finish being a rancher in Montana.
Peaky is great TV. So is Taboo.
Ironic that you preface your guidance surrounding comments with a meme :)
Don’t forget about their pathetic attempt to make Mike seem more useful/important: “you’re the heart of this group, Mike! & without heart, we’ll fall apart” 🤢
The response to this show makes me feel like a crazy person. I couldn't finish the first season for a lot of reasons (the lack of subtlety was difficult to stomach), but the big one was how they wasted Winona Ryder by writing her as the most flat character in the history of TV - every scene was her hysterically crying. I fast forwarded through all of her supposedly deeply emotional scenes because it made me cringe or laugh. I've been completely shocked that such a large amount of people have stuck with it for this many years.
Also, the kids suck at acting (at least they did at the time). Scenes flowed like a film school project with a $100 million budget.
There was also no tension whatsoever to Rider's hysterical flailing after, what, the first episode? Because the audience finds out that Will is alive loooooong before his mom does. I'm normally a big fan of dramatic irony, but the Duffers managed to use it there to gut the drama.
Freddie... you’re not wrong on any of these points, but come on.
The show started as a genre tribute show, but it’s not that anymore.
It’s a thrill ride now.
And a pretty well made thrill ride!
Sure, you don’t have to look very hard to see the gears of that thrill ride that sometimes cynically and sometimes nonsensically turning to keep the whole operation running, but in the end it delivers on its promise to have suspense, mystery and action that appeals to a mass audience.
And mass appeal isn’t in itself proof of worthiness, but I really do like that it’s a show that I watch, my wife watches, my kids watch, their friends watch, the people at my gym watch... and we can make small talk about. There are very few movies/shows that are like that anymore.
But this is my problem: thrill rides aren't meant to be dozens of hours long. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark be better if it was as long as this last season of Stranger Things?
No, because Raiders is a perfect movie.
But it’s a pretty good comp, because Raiders is a tribute to the serials that did the thing that Stranger Things is trying to do: you buy a ticket, ride the roller coaster for a bit then get dropped off at the same place you started, without the characters changing too much. And serials are made to just keep repeating the formula for as long as people are still buying the ticket.
I think good stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and the problem with modern Hollywood and its franchise obsession is that nothing is allowed to end. This show is a perfect example. I could easily envision a good two-hour movie and good two-hour sequel based on these characters and themes and plot points. But there's, what, 40 hours of this show now? It doesn't have the bones to sustain that.
That's been one of the criticisms leveled at Western super hero comic books for years. By contrast Japanese manga tell a self contained story with a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end that allows for a traditional dramatic story telling arc.
Comic books, by contrast, just go on and on and on like soap operas for the geeky set. The infiltration of that kind of story telling into mainstream movie making with the popular success of the superhero genre is probably not a positive development.
"[The lack of a beginning, middle, ending has] been one of the criticisms leveled at Western super hero comic books for years."
Indeed. It's why we just keep getting reboots. It's why superhero-type comic books get alternative universe cycles and why all the superhero comic books eventually jump the shark: they are built on mechanics of increasing stakes, and superheroes all eventually reach world-level stakes (or higher), and you can only do that so much before entering the realm of the absurd. This is a feature of their model: they find it difficult to be truly "episodic" which in theory one can do over and over again, but their business model involves continuing to sell the popular superheroes because they make money. Developing new comics is hard and risky by comparison.
"By contrast Japanese manga tell a self contained story with a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end that allows for a traditional dramatic story telling arc."
I'm a bit leery of this. Not that manga has these neverending series that get constantly redone; I'm not aware of that sort of thing in manga (though it may exist outside my knowledge; I'm no manga expert); rather, if you look at the "graphic novel" aspect of comics, those typically have that same kind of beginning - middle - end structure you see in most manga. Comics just seem to inhabit the same universes and reuse the same characters over and over again. (One could argue that a lot of manga does the same, but merely calls the characters different names and uses different art. I'll leave it to someone else to decide how different that really is.)
There are definitely interesting parallels to be drawn between pop culture narratives and commedia dell'arte. Deploying types instead of characters in fiction has its advantages in putting the consumer on familiar ground almost instantly. I suspect that "Stranger Things" is guilty of this given Mr. deBoer's post and the comments here.
But if you are going to argue that 90% of comics (or movies, or novels, or whatever) are derivative that implies that there is a 10% that is more exceptional. There are reboots eager to trot out the same tired clichés in place of well rounded characters but there are also works like "The Watchmen" that are intent on exploring and subverting those old tropes.
Sometimes the problem is "the wheel barrel of cash" issue.
Writer: I have a great idea for an 4 part limited series
Faceless Money Man: OK, I will take a chance and fund it
<1yr later after wild success>
Faceless Money Man: Lets do 10 more seasons and Cha-Ching our way to profits!
Writer: I dont have anything really more to write. I even killed off the most important characters.
FMM: <rolls out wheel barrel of cash>
Sometimes the writers don't go along, eg Damon Lindelof and Watchmen.
Ricky gervais turned down more Extras too
One of the best examples of this, imo, is the massive difference in quality between Torchwood: Children of Earth and Torchwood: Miracle Day. They are a couple of years apart and Children was made in England, 5 episodes only but quite possibly one of the best series I have ever seen: the simplicity and economy with which they tell the story is what makes it so fantastic. Fast forward to Miracle Day, produced by the ScyFy (sic?) channel in the US, what clearly should have been 5 episodes was stretched to an unbearable 12 episodes. Fucking horrendous and what an ignominious way to end a franchise
Yes! 2 hour thrill ride- that what movies are for now. Serials need both story and great dialog - if the subject (period pieces IMO) is something you don't care about then the acting has to be great.
This gets to a formula I used to hear about in Hollywood. Nick Stevens at UTA was the first guy who said it to me. Brad Grey later said same thing. People will watch a show or movie about them (a mirror) with just an accurate story. A baseball movie with bad acting and dialog? Baseball players will watch it. If you want to broaden its success, writing dialog is harder but cheaper to do. If you get all three you have Field of Dreams.
Freddie, IDEA FOR YOU, a guy I know wrote a graphic novel about making of The Godfather (he hired an artist) so that he could pitch it to studios- it's now on Paramount+ "The Offer" - it's really great. The graphic novel gets the storyboards done, so it's easier to get optioned and made.