Stranger Things Season 1
Overview
The first episode ends with a boy vanishing into thin air on a road lit by flickering streetlights, and the show barely lets you breathe after that. Will Byers disappears on his way home from a Dungeons & Dragons game in 1983 Hawkins, Indiana, and while the town searches the woods, his friends run into a girl with a buzz cut, a hospital gown, and the number eleven tattooed on her arm. Millie Bobby Brown says almost nothing in those early episodes and still walks off with every scene she's in. Winona Ryder, as Will's mom Joyce, plays grief like a live wire — the Christmas lights strung across her living-room wall, spelling out messages from somewhere else, became the image of the summer of 2016. David Harbour's Chief Hopper gives the mystery a bruised, beating heart. The Duffer Brothers clearly grew up on Spielberg and Stephen King, but this never feels like karaoke. Eight episodes, a synth score you'll hum for days, and a rotting parallel world called the Upside Down that's equal parts terrifying and sad. Netflix dropped it quietly in July. Nobody stopped talking about it all year.
