Stranger Things may be over—and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen might have turned out to be a poor replacement—but the Duffer Brothers get back on supernatural track with The Boroughs, a charming and intriguing monster-mash mystery that functions as their spin on Ron Howard’s 1985 film Cocoon.
The story of a retirement community whose sunshiny perfection masks dark secrets, Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews’ Netflix series (May 21) takes the sorrow, pain, and frustration of advanced age as seriously as it does its spooky suspense, both of which prove inherently intertwined in this conspiratorial thriller about the quest to defeat time.
With a sterling over-50 cast headlined by Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman, it’s a consistently surprising new-by-way-of-old-school genre affair that appears primed to be the streamer’s next big thing.
In the aftermath of his wife Lilly’s (Jane Kaczmarek) sudden death, Sam Cooper (Molina) is dropped off by his daughter Claire (Jena Malone) and son-in-law Neil (Rafael Casal) at The Boroughs, a twilight-years enclave in the middle of the desert.
Sam is a preternatural grump who hates everything about his circumstances, including the voice assistant in his new house in a cul-de-sac that was previously inhabited by Grace (Dee Wallace) until—as revealed in a prologue—she fell victim to something inhuman. An engineer by trade, Sam likes to tinker with archaic TVs and now views himself as a prisoner, and Molina makes his crotchetiness a source of humor even as he roots it in borderline-inconsolable grief.
Things don’t improve for Sam when he’s confronted in his new house by its former inhabitant Edward (Ed Begley Jr.), who cryptically says, “The owl is in the wall,” and slashes Sam’s arm before being subdued by employees and taken back to The Manor, the Boroughs’ long-term care facility.
Fortunately, Sam is shaken out of his misery by neighbor Jack (Pullman), a gregarious ladies’ man whose good cheer is as persistent as Sam’s ill temper. After relenting to Jack’s request to throw him a welcome party BBQ, he meets the rest of the cul-de-sac’s residents: ex-music manager Renee (Davis); once-successful reporter Judy (Woodard) and her pot-smoking husband Art (The Wire’s Clarke Peters); and doctor Wally (Tony-winner Denis O’Hare), who’s in search of a “miracle” for his incurable prostate cancer.
Every one of The Boroughs’ characters is intensely likable, and at their maiden gathering, Sam deduces that Jack and Judy are carrying on a tryst behind Art’s back. Theirs isn’t the only thorny romance, as Renee soon strikes up a May-December relationship with security guard Paz (Carlos Miranda), whose boss Hank (Eric Edelstein) is a menacing boor who not-so-subtly looks down upon the graying men and women he’s sworn to protect.
While Hank doesn’t attempt to hide his villainy, the material’s real baddie, Blaine (Seth Numrich), conceals his malevolence behind a smile. The current CEO of the Boroughs (and the grandson of its founder), Blaine, and his wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) are visions of squeaky-clean 1950s normalcy. Their soft-spoken, compassionate demeanors quickly come across as unnerving, even as they do their best to help Sam acclimate to his new environs.
Sam’s world goes topsy-turvy (if not quite “Upside Down”) when he has a late-night encounter with an entity straight out of a creature feature. This incident is far from the only bizarre thing taking place in the Boroughs, with Renee trying to figure out who’s stealing quartz from her crafts room and Art witnessing an enormous flock of crows fatally hurtling to the ground in unison.
The Boroughs doesn’t lack for the enticingly inexplicable, and Sam swiftly finds himself at the center of it all, not least of which because he’s wracked by visions of Lilly, which don’t seem to be simply manifestations of his lingering heartache.
The show’s creators dole out hints about the overarching madness going on in the Boroughs while continuously upending expectations with bombshells. Consequently, The Boroughs never loses steam or detours into overly familiar territory.
Wedding its craziness to its characters’ fears and angers over growing old—the way in which their bodies are failing them, their dreams have only been partially realized, and most of society regards them with condescension and pity—the series, in character, theme, and action, is unified through and through. Even once the true nature of Sam and company’s predicament becomes clear, there’s welcome coherence to the proceedings, not to mention a confidence of pacing and tone.
At every turn, The Boroughs uses the mistreatment of the elderly as a catalyst for out-there mayhem involving clandestine scientific experiments, cult-ish schemes, and sinister creepy-crawlies.
Molina, Woodard, O’Hare, Peters, and Davis ground the insanity in real-world emotion, delivering vibrant performances that are at once amusing and poignant, and their protagonists’ efforts to thwart their adversaries’ machinations play out with just the right mixture of tension and silliness. Moreover, they do so without the constant overt homages that defined the Duffer Brothers’ prior hit, although the show effectively channels ‘80s Amblin features and Stephen King tales for its portrait of retirees under siege from physical, societal, and unholy threats.
A self-contained adventure that pits youth against age in various sticky respects, The Boroughs mines the desire to recapture the past, and to defeat death, with earnestness and excitement, as well as via revelations that are never quite what one anticipates and always thrust the story down rewarding new avenues.
To say that it’s a joy to watch these stars give great lead performances in a high-profile Netflix series is to flirt with the sort of patronizing attitude that Sam and his friends routinely face. Yet it remains true that in today’s entertainment landscape, older greats are rarely granted such front-and-center opportunities, and Addiss and Matthews’ willingness to provide them with something juicy to bite into—and which addresses the very marginalization that reduces their chances to shine—is almost as enlivening as the fact that their show is so assured.
Ultimately, the best thing one can say about The Boroughs is that at the conclusion of its eight-episode debut run, one immediately craves more. If Netflix is smart, they’ll keep this superior scary saga alive for a long time to come.
