Almost a full 10 years after debuting on Netflix, Stranger Things has finally come to a close in its fifth and final season. Ordinarily, one would say that audiences grew up with the children at the heart of the science fiction bildungsroman, but that’s not really true in a case where the actors have lapped the characters whom they play by over a decade in some cases.
In the first season, the five preteen actors at the core of the cast played 12-year-olds, while their older siblings, teenagers in-universe, were played by actors in their early 20s. By the show’s finale, only four years are supposed to have passed. But the 16-year-old Jane Hopper, known in the wider culture by her mononym of “Eleven,” is played by Millie Bobby Brown, who is now an almost-22-year-old wife and mother. The godfather of Brown’s child is Noah Schnapp, who is similarly 21-playing-16 in the show, despite being about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, and Joe Keery, who are supposed to play college-aged characters by the show’s last season, are 30, 31, and 33 years old, respectively, in real life.
It’s easy to chalk up one delayed television season to the 2020 pandemic, but the stultifying schedule of Stranger Things is more the industry rule than the exception these days. Hit high school drama Euphoria is finally scheduled to return to HBO this spring, but the four-year delay since the last season aired necessitates a multiyear flash forward, lest the 29-year-old Zendaya, 28-year-olds Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney, and 35-year-old Alexa Demie continue to be asked to portray awkward 16-year-olds.
Also returning to HBO is House of the Dragon, which famously recast its protagonists halfway through its first season to accommodate a 10-or-so-year time jump in-universe. For example, the then-19-year-old Emily Carey and 22-year-old Milly Alcock, who played the teenage Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen, were replaced by the then-28-year-old Olivia Cooke and the 30-year-old Emma D’Arcy when their characters were aged up by a decade in the first season. The third season will air nearly five years after the first was filmed, shortly after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. At this pace, the fourth season will come out in time for the 2028 election, and the Game of Thrones spin-off might as well return to the original cast, who will be closer in age to their in-universe characters than the secondary actors who were cast specifically to better align with the show’s aged-up timeline.
Name a top television show these days, and expect, at minimum, a two-year wait. CGI-heavy shows such as House of the Dragon will blame postproduction for the delay, but what excuse does a frothy regency romance such as Netflix’s Bridgerton have? At this rate, the eight-season series, based on the eight happily ever afters of the eight Bridgerton children, will wait until the actress Claudia Jessie turns 40 to play a 19th-century noble girl falling in love for the first time.
None of this is to mention that TV seasons themselves have become truncated. Whereas ABC put out multiple 20-something episode seasons of Lost, itself an animation juggernaut, for multiple years in a row with just three-month breaks in between, fans of The Boys can expect an eight-episode final season to air two years after its last entry on Amazon Prime.
ROB AND MICHELLE REINER DESERVED BETTER
The final Stranger Things season reportedly cost Netflix nearly a half-billion dollars, as though money compensates for quality. But some of the best episodes of television ever created were the cheapest. The Office‘s “Dinner Party” and Mad Men‘s “The Suitcase” were filmed almost entirely on single sets with a handful of actors, and Breaking Bad‘s iconic bottle episode, “Fly,” was literally written as such because the showrunners ran out of money and spun desperation into genius.
As anyone paying for a smorgasbord of streaming services just to finish this NFL season can attest to, the streaming industry has essentially recreated cable-company prices from first principles, so why can’t it resurrect cable-quality scheduling? The Smoke Monster on Lost may not have been exactly as realistic as HBO’s dragons, but whatever TV once lacked in blockbuster-quality theatrics, it had an abundance of in storytelling and momentum. And you know what’s less realistic than a fantasy monster that has been rendered slightly less technically advanced than a James Cameron film? Literal parents and college graduates pretending to be high school students.
