• 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.

The post Netflix’s ‘The Boroughs’ Review: Stranger Things for Seniors appeared first on Cream.

• Gaten Matarazzo will make his West End debut as Mark Cohen in a revival of Jonathan Larson’s Rent
• The show opens at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre on September 26, 2026, with an official opening night of October 8
• Director Luke Sheppard, fresh off his Olivier win for Paddington: The Musical, returns to helm the production
• Matarazzo is described by producer Chris Harper as a self-described “Rent-head” who knows the show “encyclopedically”
• 10,000 tickets will be priced at the UK equivalent of $46 or under, with producers prioritizing accessibility

Gaten Matarazzo is trading Hawkins, Indiana for New York’s East Village. The Stranger Things star, 23, will make his West End debut this fall as Mark Cohen — the narrator and documentary filmmaker at the heart of Jonathan Larson’s landmark rock musical Rent — in a new revival opening at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre on September 26, 2026.

The production marks the 30th anniversary of Rent‘s original premiere, and for the fans who grew up watching Matarazzo play the lovable, curly-haired Dustin Henderson across five seasons of Netflix’s Stranger Things, it’s the kind of casting that makes perfect sense once you hear it. Turns out, Matarazzo has been a theater kid his whole life — long before Dustin ever stepped foot in the Upside Down.

A Theater Kid Through and Through

Matarazzo made his Broadway debut as a child in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, followed by a stint in Les Misérables. More recently, he played Jared Kleinman in Dear Evan Hansen and Tobias in the acclaimed Sweeney Todd revival alongside Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. The stage has always been home for him — Stranger Things just happened to make him famous everywhere else.

And Rent? That’s personal. Producer Chris Harper, who is teaming with Sonia Friedman for the first time on this production, revealed that the role came out of a broader conversation he and Matarazzo had been having about doing a London show together. “Actually through that conversation he said how much he loved Rent,” Harper shared. “He’s a real Rent-head — he knows the show back to front and it’s a musical he’s deeply, deeply passionate about. He literally knows the show in an encyclopedic way. He loves it, and he’s a very sweet young man, and he can’t wait. He’s desperate to start.”

Rehearsals are set to begin in early August.

The Production Behind the Revival

Directing is Luke Sheppard, who last month took home the Olivier Award for best direction of a musical for Paddington: The Musical — currently playing to packed houses at the Savoy Theatre — and is already being talked about as a likely Broadway transfer. Sheppard previously staged a version of Rent at Manchester’s intimate 120-seat Hope Mill Theatre in 2020, a run that was cut short by the pandemic but not before it made a serious impression on the people who saw it. Harper caught it just before theaters shut down. Friedman watched it later on video. Both were immediately committed to bringing it to London.

“Stripped back and bare — just let the story and the performances do the work,” is how Friedman described what Sheppard achieved at Hope Mill. “I felt I’d seen Rent for the first time.”

It took six years of navigating complicated rights and working to earn the trust of the Larson estate before this production could happen. “It’s taken us six years of chipping away to get this version of the show to London,” Harper said, noting that Jonathan Larson’s family “wanted to feel that the next version of Rent that was in the West End was one that we all really could be proud of.” In that time, Sheppard went from a respected regional director to an Olivier winner. The timing, ultimately, couldn’t be better.

The production is being produced by Chris Harper Productions, Sonia Friedman Productions, Winkler & Smalberg and Julie Larson, in association with the Hope Mill Theatre.

Why Rent Still Hits

Rent tells the story of a group of young artists struggling to survive in New York’s East Village in the late 1980s and early ’90s, living under the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Larson, who wrote and composed the entire show, died tragically of an aortic dissection the night before its first off-Broadway performance in January 1996. He was 35. The show transferred to Broadway a few months later, ran for 12 years, and became one of the longest-running productions in Broadway history. Its songs — “Seasons of Love,” “La Vie Bohème” — became part of the cultural fabric. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Oscar-nominated 2021 film tick, tick… BOOM! brought Larson’s story to a new generation.

Now, 30 years on, Friedman believes the show has a new kind of urgency. “This younger generation also finds a new resonance because the conditions that underpinned the original — even though, of course, we don’t have the catastrophe of HIV and AIDS — they’re being priced out of the city, they’re struggling to live, struggling to know how to survive,” she said. “You’ve got chaos politically, and it feels like a very urgent time for the young generation with their mental health, with social media. And this piece, even though it’s set then, I think it’s going to just feel so powerful and alive and urgent now.”

Sheppard echoed that energy in his own statement about the casting: “This is Rent in the hands of a new generation of performers who love and adore this piece, and with Gaten Matarazzo playing Mark, it promises to be a thrilling experience.”

Casting for the rest of the company — Roger Davis, Maureen Johnson, Joanne Jefferson, Tom Collins, Angel Dumott Schunard, Mimi Marquez, and Benny Coffin III — has not yet been announced.

On the accessibility front, the producers are making a point of keeping the show reachable for the exact audience it’s meant for: 10,000 tickets will be priced at the UK equivalent of $46 or under. “We’ve got to be mindful of accessibility,” Friedman said, “and at the same time mindful of the fact that we need to break even.”

The run is currently planned as a limited engagement — but if it catches fire the way everyone involved seems to believe it will, a New York transfer feels like more than just a possibility. Tickets go on sale Tuesday at noon UK time.

The post Gaten Matarazzo Is Heading to the West End in Rent appeared first on Cream.

• Millie Bobby Brown posted a beach bikini selfie on Instagram that racked up over 1.3 million likes in under a day
• Fans spotted a gold necklace bearing the name “Ruth” and immediately began speculating it’s her adopted daughter’s name
• Brown’s late grandmother was also named Ruth, who passed away in 2020, adding another possible explanation
• Back in August 2025, Brown was photographed with a phone case bearing the initials “R,” “W,” and “B” — now that “R” is looking very deliberate
• Brown has said she plans to keep her daughter’s name private until the child is old enough to share it herself

Millie Bobby Brown posted what looked like a breezy beach photo dump. Fans turned it into a detective investigation.

The Stranger Things star, 22, shared an Instagram carousel on Saturday captioned simply “juicyyyy 🩵” — a sun-drenched collection of selfies, tropical imagery, and an underwater shot that felt tailor-made for a warm-weather scroll. She looked stunning: a textured pale yellow bikini, oversized hoop earrings, a colorful beaded choker, a gold waist chain, and layered necklaces catching the light. The post exploded, pulling in more than 1.3 million likes in less than a day.

But it wasn’t the bikini everyone was talking about.

Zoom in on one of those layered necklaces and you’ll find a gold cursive pendant that reads “Ruth.” And once fans saw it, the comments went from heart emojis to something closer to breaking news.

“Her necklace says Ruth! Baby name??!!” one follower wrote. “RUTH OMG,” said another. “Your daughter’s name is Ruth!!! So cute!!” chimed in a third.

https://www.instagram.com/p/milliebobbybrown/

The Clue That Fans Have Been Waiting For

Brown and her husband Jake Bongiovi — son of rock legend Jon Bon Jovi — announced in August 2025 that they had welcomed a baby girl through adoption. “This summer we welcomed our sweet baby girl through adoption,” the couple wrote in a joint statement. “We are beyond excited to embark on this beautiful next chapter of parenthood in both peace and privacy. And then there were 3.”

Since then, Brown has been careful — no face reveals, no name drops, no details beyond what she’s chosen to share on her own terms. At her 22nd birthday, she posted a rare photo sitting beside her daughter in the sand at sunset, the little girl bundled in a teddy-bear-style outfit as the two looked out toward the ocean together. “22. grateful for my husband and daughter. for my family and friends. all of my animals. I am so blessed,” she wrote.

So the necklace? It’s the closest thing to a name reveal fans have gotten — and they’re running with it.

There’s also a piece of retroactive evidence making the rounds. Shortly after the adoption announcement in August 2025, Brown was photographed carrying a pink phone case stamped with the letters “R,” “W,” and “B” — with “B” presumed to stand for Brown or Bongiovi. That “R” is looking a lot more meaningful now.

There’s Another Ruth in the Story

Before the baby name theories fully take over, there’s a significant alternative: Brown’s late grandmother was also named Ruth. She passed away in 2020, and the necklace could just as easily be a tribute to her — or, as more than a few fans pointed out, it could be both. Naming a child after a beloved grandmother you lost is exactly the kind of layered, meaningful choice that fits the sentiment Brown has expressed about family.

Brown’s rep did not respond to requests for comment.

What Brown has said — in a candid interview with British Vogue — is that she has no plans to put her daughter’s name or identity into the public eye until the child can make that choice herself. “For me, it’s really important to protect her and her story until she’s old enough to potentially one day share it herself,” Brown explained. “It’s not my place to purposefully put her in the spotlight unwillingly.”

She’s been consistent about that. But a necklace is a different story — something personal, something worn close, something that might just slip into frame when you’re living your life and not thinking about the internet zooming in.

The Inner Circle Is Already Smitten

One detail that did make it out into the open: Brown revealed at the Stranger Things Season 5 world premiere that her real-life best friend and co-star Noah Schnapp — who plays Will Byers on the show — is the baby’s godfather. “Sadie is very, very maternal but Noah’s her godfather,” Brown told Entertainment Tonight, referring to co-star Sadie Sink as well. “They all turn into the most gooey, soft versions of themselves — their baby voice comes out when they’re around her.”

Brown has also spoken about how deeply she wanted to become a mother young. “This has been my thing since before I met Jake,” she told the SmartLess podcast in March 2025. “I wanted to be a young mom just like the way my mom was to me. It’s so important to start a family for me personally.”

And on the subject of motherhood more broadly, she’s been thoughtful and inclusive. “We’re all mothers,” she said in a recent interview with Extra. “No matter if we’re adoptive mothers, birth mothers, or a maternal figure — everybody should be celebrated.”

Sun, Confidence, and a New Chapter

The beach post also appears connected to Brown’s beauty brand Florence by Mills, with several carousel slides featuring pineapples, coconuts, and palm trees from what looks like a tropical brand activation — which explains the “juicyyyy” caption in a whole different way. Some fans were quick to read the tropical imagery as a hint that “something is coming” on the brand front.

The photos themselves come at a moment when Brown has been visibly stepping into a more confident, unbothered version of herself. Earlier this year, she pushed back hard against cruel headlines that targeted her appearance during the press run for Netflix’s The Electric State — criticism that she said left her “crying every day” and even broke down backstage at the BRIT Awards before presenting an award to Sabrina Carpenter.

“If me being blonde or wearing more make-up really bothers you, I’m going to address it — not just for myself, but for every other girl who wants to try a new hairstyle or wear a red lip,” she said at the time. “It’s, like, get off my fucking case, you know? I am 21. I am going to have fun and play and be myself.”

She’s 22 now. And whether that necklace says Ruth for her daughter, her grandmother, or both — she’s wearing it in the sun, living her life, and letting the world figure it out on their own time.

The post Millie Bobby Brown’s Necklace Has Fans Convinced They Know Her Daughter’s Name appeared first on Cream.