The past few months have taken its toll on us but the political landscape in America has impacted my wife the most. She, like so many, is having trouble with what has happened, what is happening already as a result and what looks to be about to happen to make our country more fractious and dangerous, and less clean, safe and pleasant for all its people. She’s been in need of an escape for some time and at my prodding, has finally found an escape in Stranger Things, a Netflix original series with a title that couldn’t possibly have been more prescient when season one landed on Netflix in mid-summer 2016.
It might seem strange to write about a show that’s already proven to be a cultural touchstone for so many but I’d argue that there are oodles of families who probably already subscribe to Netflix (and so many more that don’t) who have never watched Stranger Things or, like my wife, have never heard of Stranger Things.
When you spend so much time online, on social media specifically, and plugged into the entertainment world, like I do and am, you can forget that most folks are busy going about their lives, raising kids, making ends meet, trying to get by as best they can, without the bombardment of movie, TV and music news and notes floating across their screens and into their ears on a daily basis.
So yeah, I’m covering Stranger Things 7 months after it was released because these are strange times and maybe you need something even stranger to re-calibrate and escape for a few hours. Stranger Things, the Goonies meets X-Files nostalgia trip on Netflix, might just be, if not the cure, one potential coping mechanism for getting by and moving along in these strange times.
Netflix has confirmed Stranger Things season two will arrive in 2017 although an exact date has not yet been announced.
*OWTK is a member of the Netflix Stream Team. All opinions express above are honest and unbiased, as always.
