Stranger Things

A summer blockbuster on television, Stranger Things fittingly returned to Netflix on the July 4 weekend. Led by a gifted ensemble cast including an especially superb team of young actors including Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, and Noah Schnapp, Stranger Things manages to bathe in a nostalgia of 1980s public pools, malls, and summer hijinks, while restructuring the nostalgia to be more inclusive. Writer-producers Matt and Ross Duffer perform yet another masterful act of chemistry, mixing essences of and homages to a cavalcade of 1980s media, from Stand By Me to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, War Games to The Thing, The Terminator to The Goonies to create a show that still bubbles over with original fun. Part science fiction, part horror, part government conspiracy drama, it fleet-footedly veers between modes and expectations, keeping viewers on their toes and the edge of their seats. For creating such deeply fun television that placed fictional Hawkins, Indiana, and “The Upside Down” on our collective pop culture map, alongside the teeming caverns of secret government experiments, Russian agents, and other-worldly Mind Flayer that live beneath it, we honor the third season of Stranger Things with a Peabody.