The Spoiler-Free "Stranger Things" Binge

I’ve done several “kind-of” television binges over the past few years. For me, this involves watching somewhere between two and four episodes of a show per day until I’ve finished the season or the series. I typically save this behavior for when I’m on a break from school and have time to waste, because the hardest thing for me about ever doing a real binge of intentionally watching one episode right after another would be eating up so much time. I usually can only go a few hours at most before I start giving into the feeling that there has to be more important things for me to be doing other than just slowly wearing out my recliner. Today, however, was an exception.

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about the excitement surrounding a new show on Netflix called "Stranger Things." I purposefully avoided learning what it was about, other than how it was billed as a type of throwback series similar to some of mildly-to-somewhat scary childhood adventure movies that those of us who came of age in the 1980s loved so dearly, like "The Goonies," "Poltergeist," "Ghostbusters," "Back to the Future," "E.T." or even "Big Trouble in Little China" — stories that put ordinary people (often kids our age) into fantastical situations. I decided if "Stranger Things" measured up to even half of the hype it was getting, it would be worth a day of television watching. Luckily there were only 8 episodes, and each of them came in at just under an hour. That added up to way more TV than I would ever accidentally watch in a 24-hour period, but it seemed manageable. 

When I woke up this morning knowing I planned on devoting the better part of a day to watching TV, I actually felt a little trepidation about it. In fact, even though I was up way too early for a Saturday, I started the day by finishing off a book I was reading, working through a chapter of revisions, and doing some house-cleaning, all so I hopefully wouldn’t feel like I had more important things to do. I gotta say, it worked like a charm. Even though I worked in breaks between most episodes, I pretty much watched the entire series straight through. 

I won’t spoil anything about it because I think it’s best to go into it knowing as little as possible, but I will say the tone was reminiscent of some of the movies I listed above, and it captured the time period in which it was set (the early 1980s) very well. Happily the whole show was also structured like a book, so each episode picked up right where the one before it had left off. In a lot of ways it was more like a seven hour movie than a series, or even like not so much listening to an audio book, but watching a video book. For me that’s usually a characteristic of a good show.

I can remember a handful of times from high school when I would get home from seeing one of those classic '80s adventures in a theater, and I’d still be pumped with creative fuel that needed burning off. Too often though, because there were some big high school dry spells when I wasn’t writing much, I never had the outlet I needed, and I’d end up lying in bed with my head too spun up for me to ever fall asleep. Today I got to take advantage of that same buzz, and hurried into the office to do some revision work after the episodes that left me with something in mind I thought I could use. 

If you haven’t seen "Stranger Things" yet and think you’d enjoy an adventure thriller focusing on kids (and some adults who seem to know less about what’s going on than the kids do), you should give this show a try. 

Maybe you won’t have the time to watch it straight through, but I think you’ll probably wish you could.