The writing was pure film school, the acting was needlessly overwrought and the directing was nonexistent. I tried to like it, I really did, but I found myself fast-forwarding after the third episode.

With the exception of the actress playing Eleven, the child actors were remarkably bad. The lead boy (who was cast no doubt for his physical resemblance to the original Elliott) was especially hard to watch. "What's wrong with you?" and "What do you want from me?" he screams. What a brat. And poor Winona Ryder, she chews the scenery episode after episode before settling into a quiet, huggy moment with Eleven, and suddenly you remember -- "Oh, she was once a really fine actress. She was Abby in The Crucible! She seduced a young Daniel Day Lewis! But where has she been? And why is she working for children now?"

If this thing continues, the Duffer boys should bring in a few guest directors, folks who understand the craft of directing well enough to tease out a performance here or there. And I'm sure it will continue, and everyone will just love it to death, and who cares about performance 'cause that's how we do it.

Is Stranger Things the first I-GEN series? A series lifted ENTIRELY from prior media -- as opposed to, say, one's life experience? Remember life experience? It was the the original strange thing -- a thousand times stranger than media collage. Is Stranger Things thus, the first fully-sampled series? Are its "writers" merely humanoid precursors to the A.I.-driven algorithms that will soon be writing all of this stuff?

No series should winnow down to multiple choice endings, but this one did, and to their credit (hence the second star), I guessed wrong. I really thought they'd rip off The Fury. I bet you, though, it was scripted that way until someone in accounting perked up and said, "If you kill off your pervy, Cassavetes villain, satisfying as it would be, you'll compromise the bundle you're likely to make on a second season. The algorithm tells us so.