“Stranger Things,” the new sci-fi horror series on Netflix, is a cool summer treat. It’s spooky but not scary, escapist but not empty. It’s a genre throwback to simpler times, with heroes, villains, and monsters. Yet it’s also haunting, and has a rare respect for both adult grief and childhood suffering. It’s an original.
This may seem like peculiar praise for a show that is explicitly a pastiche of eighties pop culture, a TV box made of movie memories. The show’s creators, the brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, who are in their thirties, are like baby Tarantinos, but, rather than pulp thrillers or spaghetti Westerns, they’re obsessed with Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. The neon-red title sequence could be ripped from a paperback of “Cujo.” The story, about a little boy who gets tugged into an alternate reality, includes visual references to “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Altered States.” There’s a superpowered girl, straight out of “Firestarter.” Goo pours down walls, as in “The Amityville Horror.” A gang of kids fights evil, just like in “Stand by Me.” I even got a “Breakfast Club” whiff from a montage of a weird girl who gets a makeover, in a scene with a Tangerine Dream-like soundtrack out of “Risky Business.” The show has a bifocal demographic appeal: it’s designed to charm both nostalgic Gen-X’ers and younger viewers who are drawn to a prelapsarian world of walkie-talkies, landlines, and suburban kids left free to roam wherever they want on their bicycles.
Yet the story itself feels organic and immersive, not like a gimmicky trick—and, like some of the best recent TV dramas, it’s uncynical. Three threads follow the search for that lost boy, Will. Mike, Lucas, and the very funny Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) are Dungeons & Dragons buddies who stumble upon a girl with a mysterious past. There’s a heroic dirtbag cop, Hop (the fabulous David Harbour, hardly recognizable from his time as one of the few bearable characters on “The Newsroom”), who teams up with a single mom, played by Winona Ryder. And there’s Nancy (Natalia Dyer), a pretty, suburban teen-age virgin who, in a slightly different version of the story, would surely be stabbed to death and/or attending a prom with two dates. Nancy’s best friend is Barb, an echo of nineteen-eighties First Ladies that is typical of the show’s layer of in-jokes.
These three plots collide with an “X-Files” scenario involving a scary monster (“Alien”-sticky) and a scarier governmental-scientific conspiracy (creepily clean). With so much going on, “Stranger Things” could easily have become structurally lazy, exploiting the Netflix viewer’s bad habit of hitting “Next Episode” no matter what we’re offered, like the experimental squirrels we are. It never does. I could nitpick a few choices: Does the “friends don’t lie” theme need to be so heavily underlined? Should the best character die so early on? But this is astoundingly efficient storytelling, eight hours that pass in a blink, with even minor characters getting sharp dialogue, dark humor, or moments of pathos.
Still, “Stranger Things” might feel like a mere retro roller coaster were it not for that slow drip of sorrow and trauma, the residue of Reagan-era anxiety about the nuclear family. As the old P.S.A. used to put it, “Do you know where your children are?” This melancholy wells up most effectively during a set of beautifully constructed flashbacks, which appear whenever our heroes are under high stress. Without spoiling any plot points, some involve sweet memories of lost children, like the one of a boy, seen from behind, sharing a favorite song with his younger brother, as his parents fight in the next room; others sketch out disturbing scientific experiments. These flashbacks could easily be mawkish or cheesy, cheap shortcuts to establish motive and to jerk tears—it’s happened on some of the greatest shows, like “Mad Men.” But “Stranger Things” has the confidence not to show already awful things as being even worse than they are. The main plot is a swift-moving caper with jokes and jolts. The flashbacks are about vulnerability, how people are bruised in places that no one can see. The combination of those two tones is almost musical, with a sincerity that feels liberating.
It’s a special pleasure to see the nineties star Winona Ryder—so solid in recent cameos in “Black Swan” and “Show Me a Hero”—get a starring role, as Joyce Byers, a frayed divorcée whose neighbors view her with suspicion, even when she’s crushed by tragedy. When Byers loses her marbles in her ramshackle home, or hacks Christmas lights into a communication device, Ryder turns a character who could be needy or shrieky into someone whose obsessive intensity is entirely sympathetic. Using the movie math of “Stranger Things,” Byers is on a Venn diagram of JoBeth Williams, in “Poltergeist,” and Richard Dreyfuss, in “Close Encounters.” But Ryder’s performance is much deeper, whether she’s furiously chain-smoking or glaring down doubters in a local store. In her early movies, beginning with “Lucas,” Ryder had a thorny, “Lost Boys” charisma; as an adult, she shrank, receding like the Cheshire cat into those huge brown eyes. Here, Ryder’s original eccentricity feels fully revived in adult form. She balances the show’s middle-school drama with a portrayal of a more unusual kind of outsider, the grieving mom as action hero.
Ryder’s mirror is Millie Bobby Brown, who gives a career-launching performance as Eleven, the girl with something special—and who is, like Ryder’s tomboy character in “Lucas,” mistaken for a boy. Her head shaved, her face grave, she’s silent for much of the series, but she bends the story toward her, through fearless emotional transparency. In one scene, she tiptoes into an older girl’s bedroom, then opens a ballerina music box. Her eyes widen, and she takes shallow breaths, as if the music box were a bomb. It feels like no mistake that her nickname, El, is a soundalike for Elle. There’s a risk, a very eighties one, that the character could become a contrivance, the exotic among the boys: E.T. in a skirt; she-Yoda. But Brown lends her an air of refugee devastation that makes her much more than the subject of someone else’s fantasy, even when the dialogue threatens, once or twice, to lock her in a symbolic box.
“The Get Down,” which is also on Netflix, is set in the Bronx, in 1977, and it’s got a bold blueprint, one that’s particularly welcome because the subject matter feels fresh: it’s a mythological story of disco and the origins of hip-hop, filmed through shifting lenses of camp, blaxploitation, and kung fu. There’s a dreamy actor at the center, Justice Smith, as a rap tyro named Ezekiel; the “Hamilton” fave Daveed Diggs plays Ezekiel’s older self, performing lyrics by Nas. The show’s creative team includes Stephen Adly Guirgis and other playwrights, the music journalist Nelson George, and Grandmaster Flash. Overseeing this whirlwind is Baz Luhrmann, whose specialty is teen-age lust, teen-age love, and aesthetic overkill.
I’d love to report that these are seventeen-odd great tastes that taste great together. Unfortunately, the show is working under a severe handicap, which is that the pilot (the one episode directed by Luhrmann) is truly terrible. It’s baggy and self-indulgent, alternately confusing and obvious. The next three episodes aren’t great, either, though they have flashes of interest—a skosh better than HBO’s “Vinyl,” but that’s not enough skoshes, unless you’re really committed to the project (or are reviewing it). Then, suddenly, there’s a legitimately fun eureka sequence in Episode 5, as Ezekiel and his young crew invent a new art form. In Episode 6, we get, finally, what feels like a fully original series: crude, witty, and defiant, a crescendoing, agitprop vision of the Bronx in flames, Mayor Ed Koch ascending, and black and gay youth buzzing with creativity that the world refuses to understand. If I possessed my own special kung-fu powers, I’d time-travel and kick down the writers’-room door, forcing them to squash those first four episodes into one.
“The Get Down” ’s central story concerns an Orpheus-like teen-age rapper, Ezekiel, who is in love with a reluctant Eurydice, Mylene; she dreams of becoming a disco diva. Zeke falls in with a gang of street kids, who procure (through Robin Hood-ish looting) the equipment they need to be mentored by their kung-fu guru: Grandmaster Flash himself, played by Mamoudou Athie. There’s also Jimmy Smits, as a Bronx politico who offers Zeke a route to Manhattan power; ugly disco mobsters; nasty old Ed Koch; some cringe-inducing family melodrama; and the adorable Jaden Smith, playing an elfin graffiti impresario with an Afro twice his size. The whole thing is cut with archival footage from the seventies—of the riots, the blackout, teens in crop tops—punctuated by Dionysian party scenes, which stir up narrative energy and then, way too often, let it fizzle.
There’s a goofy moment, early on, when a stoned Zeke, gazing up from a rooftop at swirling birds, figures out how to scratch vinyl properly, using a purple crayon to mark the prime grooves. Like a lot of the show, the moment hovers between great and ridiculous, unashamed to look corny. That’s a compliment. It would be cool if “The Get Down” evolved into some messy stealth masterpiece, its many mismatched octopus arms thrashing toward something tremendous. Six episodes in, outsized ambition isn’t enough. As the Magic 8 Ball says, “Ask again later.” ♦