‘The Boroughs’ Review: Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ Meets Golden Age Sleuthing
Retired neighbors at an upscale community uncover a supernatural conspiracy lurking beneath their too-perfect new home. Starring Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard and Geena Davis.
Two trends that have dominated streaming television in recent years converge in The Boroughs, Netflix’s new series promoted less on the strength of its cast or premise than on the names attached as producers — namely, the Duffer Brothers, the minds behind Stranger Things. They’re not the showrunners, writers, or directors here, but their sensibility permeates the whole thing, especially in anything touching the supernatural mystery at the show’s core.
The other ingredient connects to what the series is actually about: it belongs to the now-familiar genre of retired or elderly characters who appoint themselves amateur detectives in the communities where they live. The template here is Only Murders in the Building, or the more recent — and also Netflix — A Man on the Inside. In all of them, older people become unlikely sleuths in the buildings or neighborhoods they call home.
The Boroughs combines both formulas. With a cast of beloved and formidable veterans, it gives us a retirement community whose residents stumble into a supernatural mystery. And it has to be said: for a while, at least, it works. The cast’s collective charisma, the personal histories of each character, the warmly nostalgic humor they bring, and the chemistry between them all breathe genuine life into the series — even if, by the midpoint of the season, things start to spiral into territory that feels uncomfortably close to what was driving the teenagers of Stranger Things, only with an extra fifty or sixty years on everyone’s shoulders.
The one who opens the door to The Boroughs — the name of the retirement community — is Sam (Alfred Molina), reluctantly deposited there by his daughter (Jena Malone) after losing his wife. He clearly doesn’t want to be there; he’s prone to episodes and visions (here, a Bruce Springsteen track plays a role analogous to Kate Bush’s «Running Up That Hill» in Stranger Things, and the overall soundtrack skews toward the ’70s rather than the ’80s, to match the ages of its protagonists). But when he meets his neighbors, he decides to give the place a chance.
Those neighbors include the affable Jack (Bill Pullman), the former-hippie couple Art and Judy (Clarke Davis and Alfre Woodard), ex-rock band manager Renee (Geena Davis), and the irreverent Wally (Dennis O’Hare). The good feelings don’t last long, because from the very first scene — in which something resembling a giant spider kills a person in the darkness — it’s clear that something deeply wrong is living beneath this manicured retirement paradise. The management couple (Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg) smile just a shade too warmly, and the head of security radiates the kind of menace that doesn’t need explaining.
The creature itself is only the beginning. The thread it pulls leads Sam, Judy, and Wally deeper into an investigation that, in true Stranger Things fashion, involves weird technology deployed in mysteriously specific ways. Meanwhile, Art starts picking up on signals coming from the desert that surrounds the community. And as one might expect, everything connects to everything else — placing these septuagenarian investigators in considerably more danger than anyone their age should reasonably have to deal with.
What keeps the show from squandering its potential is the space it carves out between the chases and revelations: room for romances, regrets, small deceptions, personal histories, and a handful of genuinely moving conversations between characters who have lived complicated lives. But the supernatural plot carries more and more of the weight, and by the fifth episode, the logic holding it all together starts to feel overly familiar — not because of any particular twist, but because the whole architecture is too predictable. Netflix, it seems, is already thinking in terms of seasons.
The Boroughs positions itself as a tribute to the resilience of people society tends to discount, and also as a gentle critique of those who refuse to age gracefully at any cost. There’s a balance between hard-won wisdom and genuine vitality that the show advocates for, and it gives the whole project — like its genre cousins — an undeniable warmth. It also gives us the pleasure of spending time with half a dozen superb actors who were carrying major Hollywood productions through the ’90s and 2000s. The show may not be essential television, but it’s a reminder that streaming, for all its excesses, has given us back some people worth watching.
