I’m here to throw my opinions into the pool of mass discussion over the current hit Netflix show Stranger Things. I might get some backlash for it, but I’ve been throwing my opinions around on the internet for no reason since I was thirteen: I can handle it.
To be perfectly honest, when I started watching it, I was excited. I love Winona Ryder, and I love 80's horror movies. I’m a sucker for 80’s tropes and cheese done well, and the show seemed like a perfect outlet for my interests. My experience did not go well with the first episode: the plot was too slow, the color palette too bland, and the story not at all intriguing. But when something gets as much hype as this show did, I tend to trust the hype. Things get mega popular for a reason, right?
This, it turns out, was not at all the case. I dragged through the entirety of the show and I found myself not only not enjoying it, but instead getting actively annoyed by it. First of all: what was up with Jonathan Byers, and what was up with that American Beauty crap between him and Nancy? He essentially went "oh hi, sorry, we haven’t met before but my hobby is taking pictures of you while you have sex with your boyfriend. It’s for my little brother, that’s why I kept that picture of you in your bra."
She didn’t end up with the creep in the end of the season, thank God, but it’s made all too clear that we’re supposed to believe that Jonathan is a good guy. You know, despite him stalking this poor girl who, for some reason, doesn’t care that he’s a complete creep. It’s okay because they had a nice round of “let’s see whose teenage angst is more generic” in the woods that one time. Hey, Stranger Things, no situation in which a boy acting so creepily and invading towards a girl is cute or sympathetic.
And Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve? He’s no better. He spends the first couple episodes whining to Nancy about her not wanting to have sex with him, and when she finally decides to, he flips to pressuring her to act differently and lie to the police so that his popularity isn’t threatened. He expresses violent jealousy regarding Nancy and takes it out on Jonathan by starting a fight with him. This, by the way, is not cute either. It’s possessive. Just because Steve decided to join the fight against the Monster I Forgot to Care About at the last possible moment doesn’t mean he isn’t just as much of an obnoxious, immature jerk as Jonathan.
After that we see poor, wise Barb get dragged off by the creature in the woods that I stopped caring about during episode 1, and we still don’t know anything about Joyce as a person. That’s right, the main character, whose pursuit of getting her son back is the main plot of the show, has absolutely no character outside of her loving her son. We get it, she loves her son and will do anything to get him back. I mean it, that’s great and good for her. But do we know anything else? Other than the fact that she’s a good mother, what else do we actually know about her? What are her dreams, her aspirations? We get a full, fleshed-out backstory about Officer Callahan, but any sense of actual personality we get out of Joyce is due to the spectacular acting skills of Winona Ryder, not from the writing.
Stranger Things, in general, takes plots, tropes, and characters we’ve all seen before and mashes them all together. That in general is a wonderful idea, and had so much potential to work out very well. But the writers weren’t taking these plots and tropes so that they could switch them up and play with them and make them new again: they took them so they could be lazy. When you re-use old tropes, you’re supposed to play up what’s delightful about them and twist it in ways to make it new again. Instead, they slapped in everything we’ve seen before and expected us to like it just because they used more tropes than we normally see in shows like it.
As a side note: let’s talk about the diversity issues in the show as well. The character Lucas is the only recurring character that is a person of color, which obviously isn’t enough to cut it to make for a diverse cast, especially because he gets only a handful of lines per episode. Honestly, they could have thrown in any second semi-reoccurring person of color into this cast and it would have reeked of tokenism at least a little less. Aren’t we done with the age of the token character of color? Haven’t we moved onto actual racial diversity in media? As if the stale take on the 80’s tropes weren’t enough, we’re forced to revert to the same diversity issues we had in the 80’s as well?
In addition, there are no LGBT characters to be seen anywhere in the show. Even though anyone with half of a brain knows that LGBT people existed in the 80’s, there still isn’t a whiff of LGBT people anywhere near the show. We’re forced to sit through the boring high school drama of Nancy and Steve and however Jonathan does not fit into this mess…why, exactly? And as if that wasn’t bad enough we also have to watch two pre-pubescent kids (Eleven and Mike) get together even though it adds nothing to the show. Why were any of those romantic plots considered creative or original? Did they run out of ideas? Are the writers just allergic to the entire LGBT acronym? Don’t bother giving me answers, because I honestly don’t care. I’m not usually one to judge an entire show’s worth based on whether it’s diverse or not, but since the rest of the show was such a drag, the diversity issues were nothing more than the final nail in the coffin.
My final grade on Stranger Things: D+. “See me after class” written on the top in red pen. I really should take a critical eye to popular shows before trusting the hype and watching them anyway. To the readers that made it through to the end of this piece: go watch The Get Down instead, or something else that actually has something new to offer the world. Stranger Things is nothing but 8 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.
