Why I Stopped Watching Stranger Things
Welp, I’ve given up. I’ve thrown in the towel. I’ve waved the white flag. I will no longer be watching Netflix’s Stranger Things. I made it through the first four and a half episodes of Season 4, but I just can’t do it anymore. The acting is bad, the writing is bad, the story itself is bad, and the 80s nostalgia the show has tapped into is overdone and tired at this point in 2022.
Pictured: Five bad actors on a subpar show.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s fine if you like Stranger Things. Judging by audience and critic reviews alike, it’s a show most people enjoy watching. But, for me, I’d rather do actual chores, like vacuuming or washing the dishes (since we don’t have a dishwasher), than have the chore of sitting through another minute of an overlong Stranger Things episode.
So why am I saying goodbye to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana?
The Awful Acting
Yesterday, I was watching a New York Mets game and a commercial came on with Pete Alonso for CarShield, which according to Pete in the commercial is a “home run” of a service to protect your vehicle. I obviously don’t need CarShield since I live in the New York City and don’t have a car, but I did have the thought while watching the commercial that the Mets first basemen is about as good of an actor, if not better, than some of the younger actors on Stranger Things.
Will Pete Alonso join the cast next season?
The kids who were cast in Season 1 of Stranger Things in 2016 hit the jackpot. Netflix seems willing to put anything on its platform and just hope that it gets a few popular shows and movies. It’s a strategy that hasn’t really worked for the company in recent years since there have been way too many misses and only a handful of hits.
To be cast on one of those few hits is super lucky for the original group of kids because I don’t think any of them have the acting chops to ever be anything close to big stars after this show, and if this show hadn’t taken off due to America’s thirst for 80s nostalgia in the mid-2010s, I doubt they’d have made it on anything else. The worst actors on the show are undoubtably Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike), and Noah Schnapp (Will), which makes the many scenes of them together outside of Hawkins like a constant reel of how not to act well.
Will is clearly upset because they decided to give him the worst haircut ever.
When our characters were younger in earlier seasons, their bad acting was more excusable/not as noticeable, but now it really stands out (maybe besides Millie Bobby Brown who’s always been pretty awful). The show did add better young actors in later seasons, like Sadie Sink (Max) and Maya Hawke (Robin), but if any of the original kids have post-Stranger Things acting success, I will be beyond shocked. Without a doubt, the acting on Stranger Things is the worst on any major television show.
The Russian Prisoner Storyline
Stranger Things has always been at its core about a group of friends fighting monsters in Hawkins. So, to switch things up, the Duffer Brothers made the bogus decision to make a major plotline of Season 4 about Hopper’s imprisonment in Russia and Joyce and Murray attempting to rescue him.
This entire Russian storyline is so beyond goofy and bad. We have a monster that’s killing kids by taking out their eyes and breaking all of their limbs, but scenes with Hopper in Russia are totally void of any real sense of danger or seriousness. It’s totally ludicrous that the Russians wouldn’t just kill Hopper, especially after he tries to escape. They have exactly zero reasons to keep him alive (besides the fact that he’s a main character on the show).
The evil Russians will shave your head, but you’ll otherwise be alright.
Parts of episodes with Joyce and Murray planning to rescue Hopper as they travel to Alaska and meet up with a pilot are so wacky they feel like they almost belong on a different show. This entire plotline feels like the creators just didn’t know what to do with these characters in connection to the season’s main story so they gave them a (extremely out of place) side story. All of this unnecessary and bad story ties into another major problem I have with Season 4 of Stranger Things, and that’s that—
The Episodes are Way Too Long!
There is absolutely zero reason for a show like Stranger Things to have episodes over an hour in length. Do some stories merit a longer runtime? Of course. Stranger Things is most definitely not one of them.
The Russian storyline could totally be removed. There are also parts of this season focusing on a group of jocks trying to hunt down an outcast kid they suspect murdered one of their girlfriends that are so cliché and should’ve been just totally done away with. Apparently though, the Duffer Brothers thought that a scary monster killing kids, the military guys hunting Eleven, and evil Russians weren’t enough antagonists for the show, they also needed generic jock bullies.
Jocks in the 80s! They must be evil!
More story doesn’t always equal better, and Netflix definitely hasn’t figured that out when it comes to these Stranger Things episodes. Maybe since Stranger Things is one of the few pieces of content anyone actually watches on Netflix nowadays they’re trying to keep viewers for just a little bit longer. That actually does make sense and would also explain why a show that’s already gone on for far too long has been renewed for a fifth season. I will most definitely not be tuning in.