Stranger Things 3 Set Itself Up for a Great Fourth Season. Will it Commit?

I watched all of Stranger Things in a week and a half. I did what Netflix wanted, I went through the “super-binge” and I’m tired. This piece is in three parts, first is a bunch of my reactions to the show after three episodes into the third season, second is a collection of my post season thoughts. *SPOILERS AHEAD*

I’m Stranger Things’d out. I committed to the binging model that made Netflix so popular. I’m more fatigued than addicted. I watched the first two seasons in about a week. During that time, I spent a lot of energy avoiding spoilers for both the early seasons and the new. As anyone who has completed a similar binge knows, this is hard to do. Once you commit to the show and fall in love with the characters, it’s hard not to Google them. I have been hurt too many times from Googling [insert character name here] and getting the suggestion [character’s name] death.

My favorite thing about television, and a lot of culture, is sharing it with other people in real-time. Netflix’s model makes this much harder. There aren’t weekly episodes, everything comes out at once. There’s no collective anticipation of what the next episode will entail, because it’s right there to be watched. I tracked down old podcast episodes from when the past seasons come out and listened to them like I was a part of the cultural conversation.

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