Stranger Than Fiction: Reflecting on ‘Stranger Things’ Pop Culture Impact Ahead of the Final Season

I came face-to-face with the Mind Flayer and lived to tell about it! To clarify: I wasn’t alone. Some 1,600 other Stranger Things fans were with me that April night, as a mechanised version of the fearsome creature from the Upside Down hovered over the First Shadow.

If this TV critic’s excursion to live theatre convinced me of anything, it’s that absence has only made the heart grow desperate for new episodes of Netflix‘s monster hit, which released its Season 4 finale way back in July 2022. The mere sound of those haunting synchronised chords of the Stranger Things theme, wafting through the packed theatre, sent chills, prompting screams and applause from a fanbase that can’t wait to see what happens in the long-awaited fifth and final season.

Not bad for a series that I initially underestimated as “agreeable popcorn fare” when reviewing its first season in the summer of 2016. (How time flies, and how the show keeps reminding us.)

Forget agreeable. Think sensational. With its irresistible blend of evocative 1980s nostalgia spiced with cutting-edge creature-feature terror, Stranger Things hit the pop-culture jackpot. By its third season, it was breaking viewership records for a streaming series, with an estimated 64 million households watching the show within its first month. Its fourth season reportedly amassed more than 1 billion hours viewed within the first 28 days, making it Netflix’s most-watched English-language series ever.

As often happens with an out-of-the-box phenomenon with such global appeal, the show catapulted its cast of mostly unknowns­ into the top tier of instant celebrity, making stars of its youngest members and providing career breakthroughs for veteran talents, including David Harbour, a Tony-nominated actor who’s now a household name thanks to his gruff charm as police chief Jim Hopper. They’ve all become fixtures on red carpets (including at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, where the cast, including Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, and Caleb McLaughlin, won the coveted drama ensemble trophy in 2017), on talk shows, Comic-Con and industry panels, anywhere where victory laps are appropriate.

What accounts for this astonishing popularity? Credit the show’s creators, the heretofore little-known Duffer Brothers (twins Matt and Ross), whose genuine love of genre and gift for homage — especially for the works of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg — is further distinguished by a full-hearted belief in the goodness of their heroes.

As I noted when reviewing the Peabody Award–winning third season, “Beyond the screams, scares, last-second rescues from subterranean fortresses and occasional gruesomeness (rarely extreme), Stranger Things wants you to love and care deeply about its characters.” Which we do.

The Duffers understand the power of a story well and truly told. “When we were growing up in North Carolina, movies and television shows were more than just an escape for us,” Matt Duffer said when accepting the Peabody Award. “They teleported us to different cities, to different countries, to different worlds.… They didn’t just entertain us. They also made us more empathetic, thoughtful and understanding. And they also made us feel less alone.”

If the fantastic fable they’re spinning feels familiar, that’s the point. We believe in the palpable friendship of these young misfits from the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. But they’re also archetypes, with inescapable echoes of our shared cultural past.

When we first meet Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will (Wolfhard, Matarazzo, McLaughlin, and Schnapp), we can’t help but immediately be reminded of the boyhood quartet from the King-inspired Stand by Me. As in that 1986 classic, set at the cusp of the 1960s, these kids live in a world many of us wistfully pine for: an idyllic time before smartphones, when the only screens available were on TV, at the movies or the arcade, allowing the imagination to run wild.

Even so, they’d never met anyone quite like the show’s breakout character, the tragically psychokinetic lab rat Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). But we had. She’s a direct descendant of early King heroines with extraordinary powers (Carrie and Firestarter). You could fill a book with such examples.

Even the casting of its more familiar faces sets off déjà vu vibes in the best ways, most notably regarding Winona Ryder, the 1980s and ’90s screen queen of the macabre (Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stoker’s Dracula), who grounds the series with maternal passion as the excitably neurotic Joyce Byers. Playing her Season 2 boyfriend, the much-loved and lamented Bob Newby, Sean Astin genially conveyed fond ’80s memories of the Spielberg-produced The Goonies, another clear influence on Stranger Things‘ penchant for hair-raising cliffhangers.

Of course, you don’t have to be a student of vintage sci-fi and horror to appreciate the show’s many delights, not all of them of the spooky variety. The themes of friendship, loyalty, sacrifice and heroism are universal and have become even more so as the core characters graduate into puberty, deepening their amorous attachments and desires.

As I noted in my Season 3 review, this is especially acute for Eleven. “Deprived of a normal childhood, [she] can’t always fathom her feelings for smitten Mike Wheeler, and learning that boyfriends lie can be nearly as crushing as the latest assault by a multi-tentacled Mind Flayer from the netherworld. With the move toward spin the bottle and away from Dungeons & Dragons comes a romantic ache for the loss of childhood and innocence.”

Expectations run high as the world eagerly awaits these final episodes, which are rolling out like gifts during the holidays, dropping on Thanksgiving eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. However the Duffer Brothers nail the landing, the impact of their creation is undeniable.

Beyond the viewership statistics and critical acclaim, the merchandising and the hype, the industry has embraced Stranger Things, nominating the show for the best drama Emmy in each of its four seasons, an impressive feat for a fantasy-horror series. The first two seasons made the list of the year’s Top 10 shows selected by the American Film Institute (on whose jury I sat).

In accepting the Peabody Award, Ross Duffer acknowledged the “big audience of nostalgic nerds, more or less like us” that the show attracts. “But we also have a large audience of young kids, kids who are growing up in a sometimes scary and uncertain time. We always wanted our message to them to be fairly simple: that the power of friendship can overcome incredible obstacles, that being weird and thinking different isn’t a flaw; it’s a superpower. That each of us has the power to grow and change, and that by working together despite our differences and often because of them, we can overcome incredible odds.”

Hey, stranger things have happened.

Stranger Things, Season 5 Volume 1, Premiere, November 26, 2025, Netflix
Stranger Things, Season 5 Volume 2, Premiere, December 25, 2025, Netflix
Stranger Things, Season 5 Finale, Premiere, December 31, 2025, Netflix