On May 26, 2026, Netflix went dark on its production updates for the final season of Stranger Things, yet the show's massive footprint still shapes the network's upcoming slate. On Fresh Air, critic David Bianculli noted that the formula of the show succeeded because "its protagonists were quirky outsiders, unpopular teens for the most part, who found themselves and one another while battling monsters and bad guys in their isolated small town." Now, executive producers the Duffer Brothers are applying that exact setup to the geriatric set in their new series The Boroughs. Host Tanya Mosley reported that the creators "couldn't understand why no one had made another Cocoon," leading them to swap out the unpopular teens for residents of a retirement community.
However, not everyone was initially thrilled by the comparison to the mega-hit. Actor Clarke Peters admitted on Fresh Air that he "didn't want to do The Burrows, uh, because someone had likened it to, um, Stranger Things," a show he had never even watched. His concern was purely practical: "what I didn't want to be doing was acting as I'm chasing monsters until I'm 80 years old." He eventually relented after reading the script and seeing the stellar cast, finding a story he could actually "resonate with."
Meanwhile, the business model behind the franchise is still drawing fire from media commentators. On The Bill Simmons Podcast, host Bill Simmons argued that the show's binge-release format severely hurt episodic cultural discussion. Simmons complained that "Stranger Things was bad for us the way the schedule was," arguing that a weekly rollout would have sustained much stronger engagement. "If they had spread it out, it would've been better for us," he lamented, highlighting the tension between Netflix's drop-all-at-once strategy and the needs of the podcast ecosystem.