Why Teens Are Watching Stranger Things (When They Don’t Watch TV)

When joining a conversation or reading about Stranger Things, I always hear people shouting about “nostalgia.”

“This is NOSTALGIA PROGRAMMING!”

“THE NOSTALGIA TREND!”

The implication, of course, being that the only people who could possibly like Stranger Things (or something like the upcoming Top Gun sequel) are those that actually remember the era in question: In this case, Americans going through puberty in the mid-’80s, who frequently hit the local Starcourt mall in some version of Eleven’s gaudy romper and/or spent all their quarters on Dragon’s Lair and Orange Juliuses.

And my counter to these “NOSTALGIA!” hand-wavers is always the same: you mean people exactly unlike the Duffer Brothers?

It’s true: twins Matt and Ross Duffer, the show’s creators, were born February 15, 1984. Do some fast math, and that’ll tell you that the Duffers were 32 in 2016 when Netflix debuted the first season of Stranger Things, which, if you recall, was set in 1983, a whole year before the Duffer boys even graced the planet. For reference, The Goonies, to which Stranger Things is perhaps most frequently compared, came out in 1985. What, did the Duffers watch it while they were still in diapers?