TBH I never got into Stranger Things. All of these critically acclaimed TV shows are always like "OH TRUST ME IT GETS GOOD AFTER THE FIRST 3 HOURS" like nah I'm good, mate.
Idk if I have a favorite TV series but I guess some recent picks would be The Midnight Club and Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, both of which are pretty gripping from early on tbh. If both of them took multiple episodes for stuff to start happening and multiple seasons to resolve any plotlines then I would never recommend them to anybody: at that point reading books is more thrilling.
A series serves better as a collection of stories whose whole is more meaningful than their parts.
I think Game of Thrones had lots of intrigue in the first few episodes but I also didn't like that one because I'm not a big fan of incest, murdering children, discussion of if prostitutes do or do not constitute skill in getting laid, and rape by the ocean. Also, sociopolitical landscapes of medieval Europe in grimdark lack of proper succession contexts.
Not the guy you're talking to, but my opinion is the only good shows spend time building their world like that. It shows the world is complex and matters. If you blow past that then your world must either be identical to ours or it isn't interesting.
My favorite show I think is Battlestar: Galactica. You have to watch a entire miniseries before it gets into the swing of things; when the episodes start. The viewer needs to be immersed in the world to be able to understand the stakes and actually care about what's happening, for any world anyone creates that isn't our own.
ST is good out of the gate. I found it just fell off hard after S1. Hat’s off to the marketing team though. They saturated the internet with gifs and image macros and even managed to get a meme template generated.
I liked season 4, but season 1 just can't be topped for me because of how grounded it was. Just normal characters from a small town experiencing supernatural things in a way that's believable. The rest of the show is good as long as you let go of any wishes that it stayed grounded like season 1.
Season 1 is also great because it did a great job having the kids be basically doing ET, the teens doing a camp horror and the parents doing a cold war conspiracy thriller.
Every season since of course needs to alter the group compositions, so we rarely get this again, although the elements are still there, they're now shaken up enough that the show is often more focused on riffing on its own formula then emulating the media that inspired it. And that's fine, it should probably be a good thing that it's not in the shadow of it's inspirations, but man do I miss that specific vibe.
For me it was season 3 that I found the worst, too much slapstick and I disliked how they turned Hopper into a walking bastion of juvenile insecure comic relief. Season 4 on the other hand rocked again, much darker and a better balance between seriousness and humour.
The show was started with a pair of guys - I forget if they were brothers but they were at least reputedly friends - who had a vision of what they wanted to do. They broke apart as the show was renewed after the first seasons though, hence that immediate drop in quality from this magical wonderland to "grrr, watch beast go smash into goo".
From what I read, they told themselves they would have (at least) two rules: (1) never use CGI - only puppets - for the purity of what seeing them, and more importantly not seeing them, conveys; and (2) do not "sell out" the show merely for reasons of profit. Money is fine but don't continue it unless there is a real story that wants to be told.
After the financial success of the first season, one of the co-creators left, and the second season was literally a different show, yet Netflix lied to us all and heavily pushed it as if it were the same as the first, for profits. It backfired, and revealed all the more how Shitflix just pushes forward purely for profits at the expense of offering much that is actually worth watching.
But if it got better after that, I might push through, one day. :-|
Where are you getting this information? I see that the Duffer Brothers were still on as producers and writers for season 2.
What I am reading is that they originally intended for the show to be a one-off or an anthology, but once they realized that they had a massive success, one that relied heavily on the likability of the kids, they changed their mind and started working on a sequel. Season 2 sucks because they were never intending on making it, and had a time crunch. With the later seasons though, they've known they were going to make them for years, and they had time to write better interconnected stories, so they've been improving with season 4 and hopefully 5.
Really? I recalled reading an article about season 2, when I tried to look up wtf happened bc season 2 was just so shockingly bad, and incongruously so seeing at how great season 1 was. Their relationship must have just been strained but not broken, or the article could have been making shit up, or perhaps over time I've misremembered things. But I definitely recalled how one or more likely both of them wanted to use puppets (in season 1) but then had to make that mess of a CGI crap monster in season 2 - as you say for the sake of the deadline (aka profits over the integrity of the storytelling process, if they could have taken the time to have done it right).
S3 was the worst one in my opinion, but everybody is different. I just feel like the massacred Hopper’s character to pay homage to the “loose cannon cop” of the 80’s.
Oof, I mean, CGI can go a long way, but still... some actors stay young-looking (Johnny Depp did, for a long time), but it's a large cast and not all of them will. And they have to do it for an entire season, which gets expensive.
But, we'll see. My money's on a fast-forward into the 90's, like someone else suggested.
How so? Like the ones they've done before? The season jumps ahead a few years? That's what I'm expecting; I guess I'm saying it's not quite right still calling them "kids."
They could do something like X-Men: Days of Future Past, where the Earth has become a sort out Vecna hellish nightmare and they go back in time to fix it, maybe run into their younger selves, or around themselves, like the DS-9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations. It'd be a pretty sad knock-off plot device, and it'd be expensive for them to run an entire season like that.
Anyway, all I was saying that they're not kids anymore. I think it was the recent announcement of Millie Bobby Brown's marriage that really made me aware of how much time has passed. Season 1 first aired 8 years ago.
