Boxing Clever: Stranger Things
Every week, Michael Telfer – aka Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This week's pick was either Netflix's biggest hit of 2025 or 1987 depending on how immersed you are in it
There aren’t many things that can unite our family around the TV these days, at least without the additional lure of hot food and snacks.
An impressive showing by England at this summer’s World Cup might have an outside chance. At a stretch a Mars landing could possibly draw our collective attention, but realistically only if the crew were then involved in some sort of Taskmaster style competition after arriving on the new planet.
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things was always going to be a stone cold banker though, and indeed the dropping (as the kids say) of each of its three volumes was greeted by a packed front room over the festive break.
Stranger Things is a Netflix science-fiction horror mash up set in the 1980s, which pits a group of children against all manner of evils that are trying to invade their home town of Hawkins, and ultimately destroy the world.
It’s an incredible series, with characters that are ridiculously easy to root for and elaborate, myriad plotlines that crash together towards the end of each season like some sort of synth based, leg warmer adorned jazz.
The show wears its eighties influences on its brightly coloured sleeves, in everything from sets, props and costumes to the plots themselves, which borrow judiciously from classic films of the decade such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, E.T., The Goonies, The Thing, Stand By Me and even Fletch to name just a few.
Back in 2016 season 1 kicked off with the disappearance of 12-year-old Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) on his way home after a mammoth Dungeons & Dragons session with his friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) in November 1983.
Will’s loyal buddies and his mother Joyce (played by 80s icon Winona Ryder) all refuse to believe Will has run away from home and when his disappearance coincides with the discovery of a mysterious girl called Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) it becomes clear to them that something is very much up in sleepy Hawkins.
With the help of boorish, borderline alcoholic Police Chief Hopper (David Harbour), Mike’s older sister Nancy (Naatalia Dyer) and her ludicrously coiffed boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery) they uncover a conspiracy that leads them to a shadowy and heavily guarded government lab run by Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), and all hell quickly unravels.
Over the following seasons new characters such as Max (Sadie Sink) and Robin (Maya Hawke) seamlessly join the core group and several more join the ensemble cast, although not always for as long as we might like. The battle against evil isn’t without casualties.
Stranger Things has everything. Humour, romance, bromance, drama, horror and above all storylines that drag you to the edge of your seat and then dump you onto the carpet.
In the painfully long gap between the fourth and fifth seasons, my then 12-year-old daughter decided she was ready to give the show a go. Rewatching it all with her was an unmitigated joy. Seeing her laugh, cry, gasp, hide behind cushions and then laugh some more was as much fun as enjoying it for the first time.
We rattled through the four seasons without drawing breath, and absorbing them in such quick succession it was impossible not to be struck by how the scale and spectacle of each series dwarfed the previous one.
This relentless growth in quality, ambition and viewing numbers placed a huge burden of expectation on the finale, which was met with feverish speculation and anticipation when it arrived in November last year.
Both fans and critics are divided over whether series creators the Duffer brothers managed to land the behemoth they had built over a decade. For my part I think they did a pretty good job of tying up all the loose ends and making sense of the lore and and I hope history will be kind.
It certainly brought our family together for some unforgettable nights this Christmas and cemented Stranger Things’ place high up on my all time list of TV shows.