STRANGER THINGS Season 1 - Bonus Review

Are we sure this wasn't supposed to be a movie?

This piece is intended as a sort of supplementary discussion to an article I wrote recently on how binge-watching might be contributing towards the tendency to treat TV as disposable fast food. In it, I touch on the problems with Netflix' Stranger Things and how they might be borne from these kinds of approaches. However, Stranger Things isn't particularly the easiest show in the world to discuss quickly; it inspires some fairly complex responses and I'm not totally comfortable with my only word on this site about the show being completely negative, given the things that it does (and could) do well. Hence this quick write-up. I will recover some of the same ground as in the previous article, but it's probably a good idea to read that one first by clicking here.

Also, SPOILERS, given how this thing has been out for a year and everything

Right, so far the only thing I've really done about this series on this site is moan about it. In order to look less like a grump, here's a bunch of stuff that I liked about it:

1. Good child actors

Do you know how hard it is to get good child actors? You must do, otherwise you wouldn't notice how badly it tends to work out. But fair play to the main child actors in this film because, as far as acting goes, these kids fucking rule. Seriously, there is a fine line for child actors between being authentic in an annoying way and authentic in a watchable way and all of them nail it perfectly. So, yeah, I doff my hat to these kids.

2. Good actors

Okay, yeah, everyone is super-fantastic in this thing. Winona Ryder must have been flipping exhausted with the amount of crying she had to do, but it's not just that - she absolutely sells the idea of a competent, loving single mother, who just happens to have been dealt some of the shittiest and weirdest cards imaginable. Also, David Harbour as the police is great which is no small matter given how he eventually becomes the show's rock. In fact, all of the performances are great, so let's move on.

3. Production

Pretty much impeccable. Like wow, seriously. The cinematography in particular, considering how close it verges on grey, stills knows how to keep things just on the side of stylistic so as to feel like this whole thing is taking place in the 80s. Honestly this is the show's biggest allure and it's hard to deny how seductive the finished package is.

See, Stranger Things beyond all else gives me the incredible desire to watch E.T. again. Even with the Stephen King stuff, this whole project just screams E.T. to me - at least from an aesthetic standpoint. That's a powerful kind of lure to throw at people's feet. E.T. is not only one of the greatest films of all time, it itself feels like the vanishing point for an entire black hole of American nostalgia - a kind of nostalgia that even I can see the appeal of and I was born in the 90s in England. I guess Grand Budapest Hotel is right - we can be nostalgic for a time we never knew. Either way, this kind of nostalgia is so central to the film's aesthetic, existence and appeal that it's pretty much impossible to talk about Stranger Things without talking about its use of nostalgia - whether its heart is in the right place, or whether you take a more cynical view.

See, the aesthetic in and of itself isn't a bad thing. But when it's the only thing getting you through all eight episodes, that's when it starts to look a bit hollow in retrospect.

Stranger Things is a show that wheel spins. I again turn to Andrew Matthews to sum it up:

"Spielberg’s classics are actually very simple stories. They’re emotionally broad and fiercely economic. Every shot moves the story forward and nothing goes to waste. If you’re staying loyal to the conventions, you can’t stretch that 90 minutes into more than 300 without some serious padding and repetition.

How many times do we have to see the cool guy seduce the nerdy girl? How many times will Eleven use a radio to prove Will is still alive, or guide the boys into the woods and back again, with no new information to show for it? Why do you think people complained that Winona Ryder’s weeping became tiresome? Because she was asked to perform the same emotion over and over again. Besides being frustrating, these repetitions actually dilute important moments. How much more exciting would it have been when the sheriff and Joyce infiltrate the evil government lab if we hadn’t already seen him do it before? He even makes a joke about using the same method."

I keep wanting to call Stranger Things a movie or a film rather than a TV show half the time. Because Andrew Matthews is right - this is an appeal to Spielbergian filmmaking that tries to stretch a 90 minute movie into a 300 minute TV show. This thing could be 120 minutes and it would make a cracking Netflix original movie, or maybe even beef it up to four episodes and just tighten it up. But it's not and this is what bugs me so hard with the show. It has to pad out its runtime, yet it rarely actually does it with anything interesting with that added run time. It's why I find the episode titles that start the episode to be kind of bizarre, because they don't really shed a light on the whole episode - there's not really an 'episode' to really sum up, just another eighth of the story. There's a hollow attempt to wrangle some sort of point together in a handful of scenes, despite there not actually being much of a point there.

I mean check out Episo- sorry - Chapter 6: The Monster. For an episode with that title, we get very little of the actual monster and a couple of scenes where the point seems to be that the real monster is Eleven. To demonstrate this, the show has her steal some Eggos from a store because...I guess the show needed to make a point somehow? I don't need the episode to completely adhere to this sort of thing (look at Breaking Bad) but what we get is just a lot of waffling.

A lot of waffles

Now, if Stranger Things wanted to be the equivalent of a beach novel then congrats, it achieved that. But the promise and potential to be more is there - it's screaming out to be seized upon. I mean, you've got some kick-ass actors, some phenomenal production and some neat concepts and ideas - why the hell am I not writing a 'go watch this show now' article and racing out to buy its Funko figures and stuff?

The very seductive appeal of Stranger Things' nostalgia, concepts and production is enough to get me to keep an eye on this show - certainly it's enough to get me talking about it. I want them to go really full-tilt into the upside down. The show was able to graze over its pacing issues a lot more comfortably whenever it embraced the weirdness or the horror and not when it was getting me to see Winona Ryder cry for the thirty thousandth time. Lord knows how much you can tell from a trailer, but Season 2 looks like it will be following down the weird and horror-stricken path a lot more heavily (though the crying Winona Ryder stuff looks like it'll be sticking around).

Now that's enough to get me interested and the first season got enough of the broad 'feeling' right that I could plop back in and give it a really good chance.

But it's not going to be enough on its own. Stranger Things needed tightening - not just for its pacing but for its characters and well. Perhaps if they're not forced to spin in circles for hours on end then the show can achieve better consistency and not cause me to go 'huh?' every five minutes. The recent announcement that Season 2 will consist of 9 episodes (one more than Season 1) doesn't fill me with hope on this front.

Still, I shall remain optimistic for Stranger Things Season 2. It's proven itself to have a great cast, some beautiful production and a whole bucketload of promise. If it can capitalise on all that, maybe I'll be singing its praises come Halloween. I'd like that.

#strangerthings #netflix