Spoilers follow for Stranger Things, up to and including the series finale.

There will never be another show like Stranger Things. Sure, there will be spinoffs that are similar to Netflix’s series, which wrapped up its nearly decade-long, five-season run on New Year’s Eve with “The Rightside Up.” And throughout the past nine years, plenty of shows have aped the Stranger Things style, and will continue to do so. But charting the evolution of the show from its surprise hit premiere on July 15, 2016, through the finale right at the end of 2025 shows a decade of growth and change in the world of streaming that we likely won’t go back to ever again.

It might be hard to remember, but Stranger Things wasn’t always the all-encompassing cultural dominator it is now. In 2016, Netflix wasn’t even at exactly the same level, either. Sure the binge model had already begun to change the way we watch TV, and the streamer had plenty of hits ranging from House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black to its deal with Marvel for Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the rest of the MCU street-level heroes. But when Stranger Things debuted, no real “Netflix formula” had codified, at least not the way we think about it today.

Stranger Things helped set the stage. An original property that many viewers thought of as “that Winona Ryder show” dropped without a ton of advance buzz or real understanding of what it was, other than some sort of homage to ’80s cinema. A large part of that lack of advance word was something that would become cornerstone to Netflix’s ambitions going forward: the Duffer Brothers, who created the show, were virtual unknowns. By the time they started pitching Stranger Things with the help of director/producer Shawn Levy, they had two credits to their name. The first was a movie titled Hidden, which they wrote and directed, and starred Alexander Skarsgard, Andrea Riseborough, and Emily Alyn Lind. That got a grand total of six critics reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and a worldwide gross of $310,273. The other credit was writing four episodes of Fox’s Wayward Pines, a show you likely forgot ever existed.

This is jumping ahead, but what Netflix (slowly) learned is you can take unseasoned showrunners with little to no practical experience, pair them with someone more experienced (in this case Levy) for new IP, and the risk is relatively low. If it fails, well, the showrunners weren’t experienced, no harm done. If it works? Bonanza!

Like many other Netflix hits that became cultural phenomena (see Squid Game and KPop Demon Hunters for later examples of this), the success of Stranger Things was organic, spurred on by word of mouth that worked despite the streamer’s vaunted algorithm, not because of it. The show was well reviewed for its pastiche of ’80s tropes and charming child cast that included stand-out performances including Millie Bobby Brown as the psychic Eleven, Gaten Matarazzo as the nerd genius Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin as the slingshot-carrying Lucas, and Finn Wolfhard as group leader Mike. Also lauded were the adult performances by Ryder as strung-out mom Joyce and David Harbour in a breakout role as the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold chief of police Jim Hopper.

It’s hard to tell how much of a success Stranger Things was in its freshman season, as Netflix did not at the time release viewing stats, but one independent look showed that it grabbed 14.07 million adults in the 18-49 demo. That put it behind seasons of Fuller House and Orange Is the New Black, and is nowhere near the December 25, 2025, drop of Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 2 lifting Netflix to (according to its own reports) the best Christmas Day viewership ever. But the point is, people were watching, and more importantly telling other people to watch.

Like the best cultural modifiers, what Stranger Things was doing in Season 1 wasn’t new necessarily, but it was remixing previous ideas in the blender with a heavy grounding of fresh, engaging characters with real emotional journeys. The Duffer Brothers pulled on everything from Amblin movies to Stephen King and Dungeons & Dragons to create a TV series that paid respect to its forebears while never feeling like an Easter egg hunt. The kids in the show loved pop culture of the time. They were nerds. So of course they saw an adventure with a terrifying monster they called the Demogorgon and a little girl straight out of Firestarter through their own experience with movies and books. That’s how they processed the world, and so, as viewers, did we.

Season 2, meanwhile, for all its high points, showed a series grappling with its own success. Additional characters, a more complicated mythology, and a clear attempt to replicate the surprise hit of Season 1 moved the action from Amblin adventures of the early ’80s to action movies of the mid-’80s. That season also included what seemed to be a half-baked attempt to create a backdoor pilot for a spinoff with the much maligned “The Lost Sister” episode featuring Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), a punk psychic kid who, like Eleven, had escaped from experiments at Hawkins Lab.

And on the Netflix end, the monetizing of Stranger Things had begun. While Marvel had its own products, it’s hard to imagine fans going gaga for Orange Is the New Black jumpsuits, or Bloodline… Well, nothing from Bloodline. Stranger Things, on the other hand, with its younger audience obsessed with the mythology of the series, and relating hard to the charming young cast (including popular canon and non-canon ‘ships), was primed for a product bonanza. That aspect is technically external to the show, but it’s impossible to separate subsequent seasons' new costumes, new characters, and new settings – Scoops Ahoy ice cream? The Starcourt Mall? Even the final season’s WSQK inspiring its own finale-spoiling LEGO set – from a mountain of Funko POP!s. Theme park horror houses on Halloween, pop-up experiences, comic books and novels, shirts and jackets and hats at Hot Topic, a frickin’ Broadway show… Even the just-opened Netflix Houses would not have happened if the streamer hadn’t been able to use Stranger Things as a test case for how to create alternate monetary streams other than measly streaming subscriptions.

None of that is of concern to the viewer, but as noted it runs parallel to the spiraling scale of the TV series. Each subsequent season, by its very nature, needed to up the ante of the spectacle from the previous one. A singular Demogorgon led to Demodogs led to the massive goop pile of the Mind Flayer, and finally the reveal of Henry Creel/Vecna/One (Jamie Campbell Bower), the big bad behind the curtain the whole time (sort of). But at least up until the final season, the show never lost track of these being normal kids in impossible situations (even as the kids grew up, got married, and had kids of their own in the real world).

And that’s likely part of the problem fans have been having with these concluding episodes, other than the mere idea that a finale is nearly impossible to stick the landing for, and has only rarely been universally lauded. The issue is that Stranger Things began by lovingly homaging the media that came before it in a way that felt fresh and new, even when it was set decades in the past. Meanwhile, the final season of Stranger Things is paying tribute to… Stranger Things. Yes, there are still plenty of references throughout, from Return of the Jedi to Labyrinth and everything in between. But unlike the more spontaneous-feeling nods of previous seasons, Season 5’s references mostly feel Scary Movie-level, done out of due diligence and to provide fodder for TikTok sleuths, rather than because the characters in the show love these things.

Nowhere is this navel-gazing more prevalent than in the preponderance of flashback scenes in the finale, “The Rightside Up.” There’s an argument to be made that they are necessary, but they are also a reminder of better, more fondly remembered seasons. It’s hard to, for example, watch the depressed, deadly serious Hopper of the finale right next to a flashback of the funny, dancing Hopper of Season 2. Who wouldn’t want to watch the latter over the former?

Is this bad? Or wrong? As I’ve been saying, Stranger Things came from nothing, and became everything. So perhaps a victory lap for the show that helped transform Netflix is well deserved.

And since Stranger Things debuted, Netflix has been less successful at creating the next Stranger Things (see Locke & Key, Fate: The Winx Saga, Shadow & Bone and others) than continuing to cultivate the Stranger Things fandom and play catch-up when something unexpected breaks out. The one exception to this rule is likely Wednesday, which is based on a pre-existing property (The Addams Family), features a big star (Jenna Ortega) and comes from showrunners with a history of hits behind them. Since Netflix has been unable to recreate Stranger Things through magic or science, perhaps that’s the streamer’s way forward: ignore the “newbie” rule established by the Duffers, and instead go for something with more potential reward. Or perhaps the one cool trick Netflix will try is buying HBO and letting them handle this going forward, while the house that red envelopes built will focus on reality show spinoffs (The Wire: The Challenge, anyone?).

Regardless of what Netflix does next – part of that strategy includes the animated series Stranger Things: Tales From ’85, and at least one live-action spinoff, so they’re not letting go of the series quite yet – Stranger Things helped teach the streamer how to be a cultural behemoth, a giant spider monster that crawls through the desert of content to consume everything in its wake. And 10 years ago, when we first found a bunch of kids playing D&D in Mike Wheeler’s basement, who could have imagined that? After all, Stranger Things was just “that Winona Ryder show.”