Why a second season of ‘Stranger Things’ will be hard work
JULY 30TH, 2016 — POST 208
Spoilers for Season 1 abound. Oh yeah, also a spoiler for the first season of House of Cards.
If we can judge the strength of a television series by critical acclaim or fan participation, Stranger Things has been a huge success for its subscription-based streaming home at Netflix. Even if there has been nothing regarding the possibility of a second season made public, there are a lot of reasons the series would be attractive for renewal. The retro-homage angle plays very well across subcultural hubs like Reddit and nostalgia is in. There’s also the period aspect of the series that gives the property a timeless quality — a bunch of seasons of Stranger Things has the potential to be a continual draw for the platform. Most of all though, it was really fucking good.
But its quality as an entertainment product is in part attributable to the focus the series had. Even though creators the Duffer Brothers are apparently interested in exploring the mythology of the world they’ve set up, the space for stories with the characters we’ve come to love is choked off in a way that is largely uncharacteristic of serialised television. Sure, the last five minutes of the series conveniently kicks open a few doors we assumed were shut, loosing a few threads that might start to be pulled in a second season. But, really, when we look at how the first season was constructed, the possibility of a second season looks harder and harder.
The first season handled its multiple stories fundamentally differently than is typical of episodic drama. For one, they have a single event that kicks them off — a set of characters united in normality that splinter off along their respective paths by the disappearance of Will. These stories are:
- the group of kids — Mike, Lucas, Dustin, El — looking for their friend.
- Hopper and Joyce searching for Joyce’s son.
- Nancy and Jonathan hunting the monster that took Barb and Will.
In a very real sense then, these discrete stories have the same goal. The motivations and methods of the characters are distinct, but they’re all trying to do the same thing. When we look at any titans of this here Golden Age of television — The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men — multiple stories are often defined by a difference in goal. The characters within them share a world, might know each other, but are relatively causally impotent in each other’s stories. If you even try to think of the story tangents of The Sopranos — from getting Tony’s mother into a home, to Chris trying his hand at screenwriting — there’s a looseness we enjoy with television.
Not only is everyone trying to essentially do the same thing — travel to The Upside Down, kill the monster, and bring Will back home alive — but the Duffer Brothers disperse information across these story lines. We in the audience know so much more than any one character: we’re privy to El’s powers, and to the “gates”, and to Hopper’s “wound” in his backstory, and Jonathan seeing Barb taken by something on his camera. In never giving one story enough information, the Duffer Brothers ensure that each story needs the other two stories to succeed. We need these stories to collapse onto each other in the series’ final act — a united front in the pursuit of a common goal.
Once that goal is achieved, the world simply doesn’t have much steam left in it. There are questions about the ultimate fates of certain characters — specifically Hopper and El — but these aren’t unresolved story arcs. One of House of Cards’s essential moves is building to a season finale where Frank Underwood ascends to a new height, a new place of dominance… just as a separate story stream is gathering the power to dethrone him — the cleanest example being the journalists building a compelling case against Frank at the end of the first season. This is the veritable “house of cards” — high and ready to topple.
Stranger Things doesn’t give me reason to expect any of these stories to hold more narrative. Maybe answers, but nothing beyond that. It also doesn’t compel me to care about the characters beyond where we leave them. I was entirely invested in seeing their goal achieved, but once they’ve got it, I can’t help feel they’ll just be okay — Happily Ever After™. The events that served as the engines for their stories seemed once in a lifetime. Where Tony Soprano would need to whack a guy a few times a season, I just can’t see Joyce having to pull Will out of The Upside Down ever again.
The Duffer Brothers very much wanted Stranger Things to feel like a movie, and its constructed as such and is successful. But it would be unwise to make any predictions of a second season based on the success of the first. They, by definition, won’t be able to do the same again.
If you enjoyed this, please take the time to recommend, respond, and share this piece wherever you think people will enjoy it. All of these actions not only help this piece to be read but also let me know what kinds of things to focus on in my daily writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
