The Boroughs Review — The Duffer Brothers Prove They Were Never Just Stranger Things

The most interesting creative decision Matt and Ross Duffer made when developing The Boroughs — their first project since Stranger Things concluded its five-season run in 2025 — was to make it as unlike Stranger Things as possible without abandoning the core of what made that series work.

Where Stranger Things was young-adult horror built around children navigating an adult world of supernatural threat, The Boroughs is a character drama about aging, community, and the specific quality of fear that comes when the world you built your identity around begins to feel uncertain. The ensemble cast — led by Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, and a supporting ensemble that reads like a wish list of underutilised veteran performers — is uniformly over sixty. The setting is a retirement community in coastal Georgia called the Boroughs, which is not quite the place any of its residents expected to end up, and which turns out to be stranger than any of them initially suspected.

What the Show Is

The Boroughs opens with Miriam Reeves (Woodard) arriving at the community following the death of her husband, having sold the house they shared for forty years to settle his debts. She is prickly, private, clearly a woman who has spent her life being the most capable person in any room, and who is furious — quietly and precisely — at finding herself here rather than anywhere else. She does not want friends. She does not want community. She wants to be left alone inside a grief that she is not prepared to share with strangers.

That the community refuses to leave her alone is the first thing the show gets right. Clarke Peters plays Elmore, a retired jazz musician who lost two fingers in an accident decades ago and who has spent every year since making music with nine. He is one of the warmest presences in contemporary television acting, and the Duffer Brothers understand that warmth — how it functions in a scene, how it changes the energy of every interaction — in a way that many writers working with older actors do not. They give Elmore scenes that require his warmth to carry weight rather than merely to be pleasant.

The Supernatural Element

The Boroughs withholds its supernatural dimension for longer than you expect, and when it arrives, it arrives obliquely. Something is wrong with the eastern wing of the building. Residents who spend time there report strange dreams. A woman who moved in six months before Miriam's arrival and who was, by all accounts, sharply intelligent and fully present, is now almost entirely absent — sitting by a window, speaking in fragments, unresponsive to the people who knew her.

The Duffer Brothers do not explain what is happening for four episodes, and the withholding is deliberate and controlled. They understand that the horror of the situation the characters face is not primarily supernatural in its emotional register — it is about cognitive decline, about watching someone disappear while they are still physically present, about the specific terror of wondering whether what happened to her could happen to you. The supernatural element is the genre machinery. The emotional reality underneath it is dementia, and memory, and the question of what makes a self.

Why It Works

The Boroughs works because the Duffer Brothers have clearly thought carefully about what they wanted to do after Stranger Things ended, and the answer was not to make more Stranger Things with older characters. The answer was to take the things they are genuinely skilled at — pacing supernatural reveals, managing ensemble dynamics, creating environments that feel lived-in and specific — and apply them to a story that requires different skills than their previous work demanded.

Chief among those different skills is patience. Stranger Things at its best was propulsive — it created momentum and sustained it. The Boroughs at its best is contemplative — it creates space and inhabits it. The performances the Duffer Brothers get from Woodard and Peters are only possible because the show is willing to give scenes room to breathe, to let subtext surface without being stated, to trust the audience to feel the relationship between two people without being told what to feel about it.

Whether the supernatural resolution in the back half of the season sustains the quality of the first four episodes is impossible to assess without seeing them. What is certain is that the first four episodes represent the Duffer Brothers' most mature work, and the most convincing evidence yet that they are not simply the creators of one very good show. They are filmmakers with a sensibility that extends well beyond that show's specific parameters.

The Boroughs is the most interesting new television of May 2026. That it also happens to be genuinely moving is the thing that distinguishes it from interesting.