The Duffers brothers deliver Stranger Things for pensioners – but it’s lacking the same magic

The Duffer brothers finally bid farewell to the Upside Down on New Year’s Eve, but we haven’t had time to miss them in the months since.

The sibs have somehow put out three new Netflix shows this year. (Perhaps it’s helped to distract from the decidedly mixed reaction to the Stranger Things finale.)

The third iteration of their producing efforts – behind Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 – is The Boroughs, which does its own upside down take on the Hawkins teenagers, by focusing its supernatural mystery around a gang of senior citizens.

Alfred Molina stars as the recently widowed Sam, who’s grumpy in an endearing way, a bit like the old man in Up. He’s trucked off to a remote New Mexico retirement community by his fretting daughter (Jena Malone). 

The Boroughs is a ‘special town just for grownups’. They have an in-house Alexa and some jurisdiction finagle so that regular law enforcement can’t encroach on their turf. It seems like the sort of thing that bodes well. 

Sam’s bungalow cul-de-sac will be familiar to anyone who waded through the Don’t Worry Darling discourse and just went to see the film.

His fellow retirees there are made up of a stacked supporting cast, including Geena Davis (seen behind the wheel of a Thelma and Louise-style vintage car, because why not), Clarke Peters and Bill Pullman.

The residents get to fritter days away playing golf, hosting barbecues and cheating on their spouses (don’t lie, some of you are more interested now).

But there’s a Stepford sense that not all is right. For one thing, The Boroughs is presided over by one slick creeper called Blaine (Seth Numrich), who is so blatantly evil it’s sort of hilarious. 

His security lackey Hank badly battles low-level crime (picture NIMBYs at war sort of stuff). He’s played by Eric Edelstein, an actor who looks so much like David Harbour, I found myself repeatedly trying to figure out if he had been snuck into the cast list under the radar.

Sam doesn’t want to be there, not only because it’s ‘God’s waiting room’, but because he is still panicked and in pain from losing his wife. 

His time at The Boroughs is changed by a creepy nighttime encounter with an arachnid-looking alien. It descends from the ceiling like an end-of-life cot mobile and is perhaps in the same family as those that populate the A Quiet Place films. 

When one of the cul-de-sac’s own is killed, the residents mobilise into our new Scooby Gang, albeit one with more aches, pains and immediate fears of death.

I doubt The Boroughs is about to set Netflix alight on the epic scale that Stranger Things did. It might have an old-timey vintage feel, but it is nowhere near the nostalgia bomb that first got so many in on Hawkins.

You can get by on a lot of charm when you cast stars like Davis, Peters, Molina and some light relief from Denis O’Hare, but there’s also only so much they can do when the material is thin. 

Annoyingly, I was fairly certain I’d worked out what was going on by the halfway point. Even then, the mystery wasn’t compelling enough to keep the hooks in to find out if I was right (had I not been journalistically obliged to).

Perhaps the Duffer brothers should hit the brakes and really fine-tune one thing, rather than pelting out several producing efforts all at once.

The Boroughs is available to stream on Netflix now.

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