The second season of Stranger Things is just around the corner. Set to debut on Friday, just in time for Halloween (when else?), Netflix’s return to Hawkins, Indiana, should prove a test as to whether the show can maintain what made it a standout in this new media environment: namely that it resisted many of the sentimentalizing or dehumanizing elements of contemporary film and television. It did this without preachiness, without subservience to politically correct pieties or ideological dogmatism. The beating heart of Stranger Things is its moral depth and seriousness, which is the strangest thing about it.
The show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, apparently had to work at successfully pitching the concept. Duffer told Rolling Stone that the show was turned down by 15-20 networks, which were confused over what it was supposed to be about. Particularly hard to understand, he recalled, was that the show stars children but is intended for adults, and neither sentimentally overemphasizes cheap innocence nor wallows nihilistically in degradation, violence, and gratuitous sex (think Game of Thrones and Westworld). Thankfully they were given a shot on Netflix and the rest is history.
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