The Day Television Died – A spoiler-free reckoning with Stranger Things

In the mid-2000s, at the dawn of television’s so-called golden age, a loose consensus formed among cultural critics: The Sopranos had killed cinema. HBO’s flagship series, which concluded in June 2007, introduced a way of building story and character that film – constrained by runtime – simply could not sustain. Tony Soprano was an antihero who was neither redeemed nor redeemable. Long conversations served no obvious narrative function. Entire episodes drifted into dreams. Viewers were invited into a slow, intimate familiarity with characters that movies could rarely afford.

Stranger Things has done something strikingly similar – by very different means. It has killed television.

Netflix’s flagship series, was more than a ratings juggernaut. It was the standard-bearer of a global shift in how screens are consumed. When it debuted in 2016, it presented itself as a small, almost modest science-fiction story – remarkably human for the genre. A mother searching for her missing son. In the background, yes, there were strange things. Strange precisely because the show preserved mystery. In retrospect, that would have been the right place to stop. But Netflix pressed on for four more seasons, each weaker than the last. There is nothing novel in this alone; Netflix was hardly the first to overextend a hit, and even HBO succumbed to the temptation with Game of Thrones.

The real break came between seasons three and four, delayed by several years thanks to an obstacle few productions escaped: the COVID-19 pandemic.

For two years, the world retreated indoors and fastened itself to screens. In developed countries, average daily television viewing climbed to six or seven hours. Among viewers aged 18 to 29 – the show’s core audience – another four to five hours a day were spent on social media. Netflix, then riding the boom that would turn it into the behemoth it is today, knew this. More than that: it knew when viewers were paying attention and when they were scrolling on their phones with the show playing in the background. It knew when they skipped ahead, what else they watched, and – by sheer accumulation of behavioral data – could infer even their purchasing habits and musical tastes.

When the pandemic ended and the series returned for its fourth season, Netflix acted on that knowledge. What it delivered was a product calibrated precisely to the directions indicated by its algorithms.

Seasons four and five stand as perhaps the clearest example of the contemporary shift from producing television to producing content. The abandonment of a conventional television structure – eight to ten hour-long episodes per season – in favor of two-hour episodes and seasons split into multiple parts reflects Netflix’s understanding that viewers, or rather users, now consume series the way they scroll through social feeds. They pause an episode to fold laundry. They browse an online marketplace for a sofa while dialogue hums in the background. The writers, accordingly, were forced to insert operational briefings into the mouths of characters five times per episode, ensuring the audience could follow the plot without really following it at all. And in any case, what does runtime matter when everything can be fast-forwarded?

I would go further: Netflix treats Stranger Things primarily as a digital asset within its interface, only secondarily as a narrative series. Having internalized the surge in streaming of nostalgic 1980s music sparked by the early seasons, Netflix decided to build the fourth season’s plot around “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush, making the song an integral narrative device. The result was predictable and spectacular: an 8,700 percent spike in streams. Just as Gmail talks to Facebook, Netflix talks to Spotify, with staggering commercial upside.

Netflix also grasped another principle of user retention: to keep viewers engaged, every moment must feel like a climax, a point at which the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Hence the promise under which the final season was produced – “every episode is a finale.” The result is a rolling, groundless sensation, a perpetual escalation competing for the user’s attention with the unhinged tweets of figures like Donald Trump.

The series’ most consequential innovation, however, lies in its near-total application of Netflix’s algorithmic logic to its own narrative. By this I mean, of course, the familiar refrain: If you liked X, you’ll probably like Y. In its post-pandemic form, Stranger Things oscillates between sensational climactic moments and functional briefings meant to keep viewers just oriented enough until the next peak arrives. The catch is that these peaks are rarely its own. Instead, the series projects back at its users climactic moments borrowed wholesale from films Netflix already knows we love – after all, it has been collecting that data for years. From E.T. to Pretty Woman, The Terminator, Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, and The Princess Bride, Netflix has replicated iconic scenes from each, having analyzed the data and concluded that this is what audiences want to see. As one alcoholic horse once put it in another Netflix series: a xerox of a xerox.

The goal, after all, is not to tell a good story, but to keep us glued to the screen—and then, once the series ends, to have us mock it on social media, generating traffic, attracting more users, and repeating the cycle.

And if this is what works, why employ writers at all? Soon, series will be able to write themselves. Actors, too, can be generated from scratch, tailored precisely to audience preferences. Perhaps we’ll even get a Sopranos spin-off that way. There is, after all, plenty of data to process. It has been twenty years since television killed cinema.

And now – television is dead. Long live content.