Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Beyond Stranger Things—Netflix’s new roundtable-style after-show for the streaming network’s beloved 80’s horror throwback—should have been a blast. Minus a single embarrassingly bad diversion to a high school senior’s remake of The Warriors, Stranger Things Season 2 (or Stranger Things 2, if we absolutely have to do that) was a delightful watch. Netflix tapped Community‘s endlessly charming Jim Rash—who also has experience with this exact interview format thanks to Sundance’s The Writers’ Room—as host, and wrangled together the series’ main cast to once again collectively demonstrate what it looks like to be way too charismatic and talented for such a young age. There’s behind-the-scenes chatter, there’s chemistry, there’s adorable audition footage, and hey, look, Bill Nye the Science Guy showed up. Like I said, on paper this thing is an easy home run.
So why was I so incredibly uncomfortable the entire time?
The show is produced by Embassy Row, the same studio that turned talking about the TV episode you just watched into a viable medium with AMC’s Talking Dead. For reasons lost to the Upside Down, every aspect of The Walking Dead‘s after-show that makes it a warm, easy-going experience was done away in order to make Beyond Stranger Things something closer to an absurdist comedy. Just on a technical level, the show is edited like a Tim & Eric sketch, never failing to cut to the most awkward reaction at the table. Doing away with a studio audience in favor of a silent basement motif does no one any favors, only highlighting the innate awkwardness that comes with any interview.
Part of this is down to the format, and I do mean literally the set-up itself. As someone who has done a fair share of roundtable interviews, I can confidently say it’s an awkward process. The center-facing, shoulder-to-shoulder conversation style almost promotes cross-talk and interruption, and that’s not even when you’re dealing with two textbook-definition introvert Duffer Brothers, a group of excitable children, and an executive producer Shawn Levy who appears to be mainlining espresso under the table. It’s the reason the editing is so oddly choppy; when you’re trying to form a coherent conversation from interruptions and side-comments, you’re forced to leave in stuff like, say, Finn Wolfhard clearly not getting Matt Duffer’s joke about adults playing Dungeons & Dragons.
But really, a lion’s share of the blame just comes down to Netflix itself. The usually rock-steady streaming network has recently demonstrated that, for all its successes, there are two formats it can’t quite nail down: 1) Kung-fu superhero dramas, and 2) talk shows. The first is a debate for another time, but the second is almost common sense. The very idea of a live talk-show just doesn’t mesh with Netflix’s entire oeuvre. A Netflix series is designed to be consumed, to be watched in its entirety as fast as possible and then immediately revisited to the viewer’s content. It’s a breathless model, where something like an after-show is supposed to be taking a breather. It’s not consuming, it’s processing.
With Beyond Stranger Things, Netflix is trying to fit a square concept into a round queue. The joy of watching someone quirky as Gaten Matarazzo, or magnetic as Millie Bobby Brown, or impressively-maned as Joe Keery talk about Stranger Things should come from the feeling that it’s a discussion you’re a part of. Beyond Stranger Things takes that joy out of the conversation. I’ve never been one to applaud anything that gives Chris Hardwick a higher platform to scream at me, but Talking Dead does understand something important that Beyond Stranger Things does not: That excited, near-manic desire to discuss pop-culture with someone within your fandom isn’t something you can binge.
Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.
