Netflix’s ‘The Boroughs’ Review: Stranger Things for Seniors

The Duffer Brothers have spent the months since Stranger Things ended launching a steady stream of projects designed to fill the void — an animated spinoff, a wedding horror chiller, and now The Boroughs, their most ambitious swing yet at recapturing that lightning. And this time, they may have actually pulled it off.

The new Netflix sci-fi horror series, created and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (the team behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), is exactly what it sounds like and also so much more than that. Set in an idyllic, slightly eerie retirement community in the New Mexico desert — think mid-century modern architecture, pastel cul-de-sacs, and a CEO who never seems to age — it follows a group of retirees who discover something monstrous is stalking their neighbors in the night. The Duffers are executive producers, not writers or directors, but their fingerprints are all over the show’s Spielbergian warmth, its creature-feature thrills, and its deep love of a ragtag found family going up against forces they probably shouldn’t be fighting.

The difference is that where Stranger Things gave us kids on bicycles, The Boroughs gives us septuagenarians in golf carts. And against all odds, it works.

Meet the Gray Rebellion

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed retired aerospace engineer from Chicago who arrives at The Boroughs furious and heartbroken. His late wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek, warm and vivid in flashbacks) was the one who wanted to move there. Her death didn’t void the contract, so Sam’s patient, loving daughter Claire (Jena Malone) deposits him at this sun-drenched desert compound against his will. He immediately tries to leave. The smooth-talking CEO Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), who runs the place with his glamorous wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg), will not be releasing anyone from their contract.

Molina is fantastic — a man whose grief has curdled into pure stubbornness, who resists every overture of friendship right up until he can’t anymore. The show’s most quietly devastating moment comes early, when Sam tells neighbor Jack (Bill Pullman, wonderfully laid-back and warm) exactly how it feels to lose someone: “My wife’s dead. And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s as clean and honest a distillation of grief as you’ll hear on television.

Jack coaxes Sam to a welcome barbecue, and that backyard scene — burgers, beers, and a cul-de-sac full of fascinating strangers ribbing each other about body counts (the sex kind, not the death kind) and trading gnarliest medical anecdotes — is, by nearly universal critical agreement, the single best scene in the series. Over burgers and beers, the crew assembles: Alfre Woodard as Judy, a former investigative journalist described as a “chatty Nancy Drew” who stalks new residents online because she misses being on the beat; Clarke Peters as her philosophical stoner husband Art, a marijuana enthusiast who claims to be golfing each morning but is really tending to his hallucinogens in the desert and has developed a therapeutic relationship with a crow; Geena Davis as Renee, a former music manager turned art teacher who drives a convertible and turns heads regardless of age; and Denis O’Hare as Wally, a doctor with Stage 4 prostate cancer who has decided to fill his remaining days with, as he puts it, “cocktails and chaos.”

It’s a genuine pleasure just to hang out with these people. The show is smart enough to know that, and generous enough to let us do it — at least for a while.

Something Is Lurking in the Cul-de-Sac

Genre legend Dee Wallace opens the series with a quietly chilling scene that makes clear something is very wrong in this paradise. By the time Sam wakes up one night to wrestle a giant, spider-legged creature off a neighbor, the horror element is fully in play. The monster — many-limbed, disturbing-mouthed, with stretched limbs that will remind Stranger Things fans of the Demogorgon’s extended family tree — is preying on residents, and it has something to do with cerebrospinal fluid, immortality, and a decades-long conspiracy buried beneath the community’s pristine surface. Secret tunnels are involved. So are caves. So is the eerily youthful face of CEO Blaine Shaw.

Because reporting a monster attack in a retirement community is a fast track to getting moved into The Manor — the Boroughs’ long-term care facility, where residents who “see things” tend to disappear — Sam and his friends are largely on their own. Ed Begley Jr. appears as a memory-care patient whose ramblings turn out to be more than confusion. The show has real things to say about how elderly voices get dismissed, how quickly a credible person becomes “confused” the moment they say something inconvenient. It’s the same dynamic that drives Stranger Things — nobody believes the kids — but with the added sting of ageism layered on top.

Denis O’Hare, who has been the secret weapon of everything from American Horror Story to Michael Clayton, is a particular standout here. His Wally carries a lifetime of loss — including memories of the AIDS crisis that complicate his every choice — and yet remains the group’s most reliably funny presence. One scene has him packing a tote bag for a monster-hunting mission with granola bars and a meat cleaver. Another has him pulling up a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. O’Hare plays it all with such genuine delight that the horror stakes never feel undermined. As Wally sees it, death is “the real monster. Everything else is shadows.”

Alfre Woodard, in a virtual press conference, put it perfectly: “It is a generation, probably, that changed the culture, the status quo more than any other one. What’s really fun about this, and instructive and inspiring about this, is that even in the retirement community, things start to happen — bad things and really weird, scary things — but nobody says, ‘Oh, we don’t know what to do.’ What happens? The boomers saddle up, they get together, and they go to stop it.”

O’Hare offered his own reading of the show’s central metaphor: “What do the old people have? Experience, wisdom, knowledge, life and history, and that ends up being a precious commodity that the monsters suck out all the stuff and turn it into gold.”

Where It Soars and Where It Stumbles

The critical consensus on The Boroughs is warm but not uncomplicated. The cast is almost universally praised — Molina and O’Hare especially, but also Woodard and Peters as a couple of 45 years who still have new things to discover about each other, and Davis, whose Renee gets a genuinely sweet slow-burn romance with a younger security guard named Paz (Carlos Miranda). The show’s score by John Paesano sounds like it was lifted directly from a 1980s Spielberg film, and the production design — retro-futuristic architecture, pastel perfection, a hard-wired home assistant named Seraphim that evokes HAL from 2001 — is gorgeous.

The complaints, where they exist, are consistent: the mystery itself is more familiar than fresh, the villain is exactly who you’ll guess from the first episode, and some of the richest characters — Renee, Art, Judy — don’t get the deep-dive treatment their performers deserve. Several critics also noted that the show scatters its ensemble across separate storylines mid-season, breaking up the chemistry that makes the early episodes so enjoyable. The Hollywood Reporter’s review called the welcome barbecue scene “the single most delightful scene The Boroughs has to offer” — and then noted it was the last time the show really let itself luxuriate in that group dynamic.

Showrunner Will Matthews acknowledged the inherent challenge of the premise at a press conference: “The Boroughs is a place that we want you to want to save.” The show largely succeeds on that front. The setting is immediately vivid, the stakes feel personal, and the eight-episode season moves briskly enough that even the weaker middle stretch doesn’t derail things entirely. Some critics wished for two more episodes to let the characters breathe; others thought it was already two episodes too long. The nature of the beast.

What no one disputes is that the comparison to Stranger Things, while inevitable, only goes so far. Both shows are about a group of friends protecting each other while investigating an institution hiding a supernatural secret. Both lean hard into nostalgia. But where Stranger Things is about kids coming of age and discovering who they are, The Boroughs is about people who already know exactly who they are — and refuse to let anyone take that from them. They’ve lived full lives, buried people they loved, watched their bodies start to betray them, and they are still here, still sharp, still capable of kicking ass. The monsters are almost beside the point.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” plays a significant role in the soundtrack, which feels exactly right. The Boroughs is, at its core, a show about people who aren’t ready to go quietly — and making a case, with considerable style and a genuinely remarkable ensemble, that they shouldn’t have to.

All eight episodes of The Boroughs are streaming now on Netflix.