• The Boroughs premieres May 21 on Netflix, with all eight episodes dropping at once.
• The Duffer Brothers exec-produce; creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews wrote and showrun the series.
• Alfred Molina leads a stacked cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Denis O’Hare, and Bill Pullman.
• Critics are largely enthusiastic, praising the performances and the show’s sharp commentary on aging and ageism.
• The series has been widely described as “Stranger Things with grandparents” — but most reviewers say it earns that comparison rather than just coasting on it.

Netflix’s The Boroughs opens with a scene that tells you exactly what kind of show you’re in for. Genre legend Dee Wallace — best known as Elliot’s mom in E.T. — goes through her quiet nightly routine at an upscale desert retirement community, and then something with too many legs comes for her. Before you’ve even settled in, the tone is set: this is warm, funny, frightening, and smarter than it has any right to be.

The series, which drops all eight episodes on Thursday, is executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer — the Stranger Things creators — but written and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the Emmy-winning duo behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The Spielberg comparisons are unavoidable and entirely intentional — this is a love letter to Amblin sci-fi, Stephen King, and the kind of genre storytelling that makes you feel something while something horrible is eating people. The twist is that instead of a gang of kids on bikes, the heroes are all in their 70s.

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed aerospace engineer who moves into The Boroughs — a too-perfect, retro-futuristic retirement community in the New Mexico desert — because his late wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, luminous in flashbacks) had signed the contract before her death. Sam had no say in the matter. He despises the place on sight. He’s described by one critic as “Carl from Pixar’s Up come to life,” and that’s not far off: the grief is real, the rage is palpable, and Molina plays it with the kind of layered restraint that makes you feel every inch of his isolation.

“My wife’s dead,” Sam tells his neighbor Jack early on. “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 a gut-punch of a line, and Molina delivers it like he means every word.

Sam doesn’t stay isolated for long. Bill Pullman‘s Jack — a gregarious, laid-back neighbor who’s keenly aware that single men are a rare commodity at The Boroughs — drags him to a welcome barbecue, and that’s where the ensemble assembles. Geena Davis plays Renee, a former music manager with a convertible and a go-get-’em energy that earns her the show’s best line: “The gray rebellion rises, such as it is.” Alfre Woodard is Judy, a retired journalist the show lovingly dubs a “chatty Nancy Drew.” The Wire‘s Clarke Peters plays her husband Art, a philosophical stoner who tends to hallucinogens in the desert and has a therapeutic relationship with a crow. And American Horror Story alum Denis O’Hare is Wally, a doctor who was on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, is now dying of stage-four prostate cancer, and somehow remains the funniest person in any room. His line about death — that it’s “the real monster. Everything else is shadows” — lands with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it.

The welcome barbecue scene, directed by Ben Taylor in the premiere, is being called by Hollywood Reporter the single most delightful scene the show has to offer — the whole crew gossiping about neighbors, ribbing each other about their respective “body counts” (the sex kind, not the death kind), trading their gnarliest medical anecdotes. It’s a blast. And then later that same night, Sam is woken by strange noises and discovers a giant spider-legged monster with a taste for human fluids outside his house.

The Premise Is Familiar. The Cast Makes It Sing.

Nearly every critic has reached for the same shorthand — “Stranger Things with grandparents” — and it’s fair. The retirement community that’s too good to be true, the overlooked group of misfits who can see what others can’t, the institutional conspiracy hiding something monstrous: these are well-worn genre moves. The series even opens in the New Mexico desert without ever once uttering the word “Roswell,” which feels deliberately, cheekily restrained. The community itself, with its pastel homes, a hard-wired in-home communication device called Seraphim (think 2001‘s HAL, but cheerier), and management that talks to residents in a patronizing, childlike manner, has the cultish, Stepford quality of a place that has something to hide.

The show’s creators have said openly that they chose elderly heroes precisely because older people are dismissed and ignored in the same way children are — which makes them, counterintuitively, the perfect protagonists for this kind of story. The Boroughs community even has “The Manor,” a long-term care facility where residents who report seeing strange things tend to end up. Anyone who talks about creatures gets institutionalized. It’s a horror premise that doubles as a pretty pointed commentary on how society treats the elderly, and the show wears it lightly enough that it doesn’t feel like a lecture.

Each member of the gang brings a specific skill to the mission — Sam the engineer, Wally the doctor, Judy the journalist, Renee the connected former industry player — and the Avengers-style assembly is part of the fun. Ed Begley Jr. appears as Edward, an Alzheimer’s-suffering resident in The Manor whose ramblings about “a creature in the walls” turn out to be anything but delusional. Seth Numrich plays Blaine Shaw, the community’s CEO, whose face is as smooth as his manners and whose motives are exactly as sinister as they appear. Alice Kremelberg plays his wife Anneliese — and notably, Numrich and Kremelberg previously appeared together in The Sinner Season 4, a reunion that fans of that show will clock immediately.

The conspiracy involves secret tunnels, underground caves, mysterious thefts of anything containing quartz, mass bird deaths, a tree bearing glittering orange fruit, and creatures that leave shiny blue blood droplets when shot. The show keeps most of the graphic horror off-camera, which is the right call — the suggestion is more unsettling than the spectacle, and it keeps the tone from tipping into relentless darkness.

Composer John Paesano’s score draws on 1980s orchestral cinema — think the emotional sweep of early Spielberg — and multiple reviewers have singled it out as something worth seeking out on its own. The soundtrack choices are equally deliberate, with songs selected to reflect each character’s era, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” playing a significant role in Sam’s emotional arc.

Where Critics Land

The consensus is warm, with most reviewers landing between 4 and 4.5 out of 5. The performances are the runaway highlight everywhere you look. O’Hare in particular is getting attention across the board — his Wally provides genuine comedy without ever deflating the horror stakes. One review describes him preparing for a mission by packing a tote bag containing granola bars and a meat cleaver, and watching a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. That’s the show in a nutshell.

Where critics diverge is on the mystery itself. Hollywood Reporter’s review is the most measured of the bunch, arguing that the show’s greatest flaw is spending too much time on the sci-fi plot at the expense of the ensemble chemistry that makes it special — that after the barbecue scene in episode one, the show scatters its characters to separate storylines before bringing them back together, and something is lost in the gap. The Boston Globe is similarly reserved, calling it “a copy of a copy” and suggesting the nostalgia is so layered — Spielberg evoking Stranger Things evoking Stranger Things evoking Spielberg again — that the show occasionally feels like it’s running on borrowed warmth.

But even the less enthusiastic reviews agree that the cast alone justifies the watch. Collider puts it well: “If Sam, Wally, Renee, Art, and Judy can remain perceptive, brave, and capable in a world that has already written them off, then aging itself becomes less frightening.”

The show is also lighter in tone than Stranger Things got by its final seasons, which works in its favor. It never pretends the stakes aren’t real, but it doesn’t wallow either. At its best — and it is frequently at its best — The Boroughs is the kind of show that makes you laugh, then makes you feel something ache, then puts a monster on screen before you’ve had time to recover.

The whole season is available to stream now on Netflix. The cast walked the red carpet at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on May 18 ahead of the premiere. All eight episodes drop Thursday, May 21.

“Death is the real monster,” Wally says. “Everything else is shadows.” With a cast this good bringing lines like that to life, the shadows are very much worth sitting with.

The post The Boroughs Review: Netflix’s Best New Sci-Fi Show appeared first on Cream.

• The Boroughs is now streaming on Netflix, all eight episodes dropping May 21.
• The show is executive produced by Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers, but created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.
• Alfred Molina leads an all-star cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters, and Denis O’Hare.
• The series follows retirees at a New Mexico desert community who discover monsters are preying on their neighbors.
• Critics are largely won over by the cast and warmth, though some find the mystery formulaic and the pacing uneven.

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.

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