Stranger Things follows a group of people within a small town who go looking for a young boy who has gone missing and ultimately realize that there's more to the mystery then they initially thought.

Some of the mystery elements were pretty good, and I watched the first season because I was curious and mostly interested. It had it's moments of cool stuff, but that was maybe once every second episode.

The show advertises itself as a horror, yet it fails to be scary. There was not a single moment at any point during season one did I feel even slightly unsettled or scared. It's more of a sci-mystery, but even then it's not that good. It lacks a substantial amount of originality, from the design of the monster to the presentation of the plot. Nothing about this show is special.

Another thing is just the amount of flaws in the show. There were multiple points where I had several questions about how certain things happened. For example, at one point two characters are in the forest together. Let's call them 1 and 2 to avoid confusion. 1 finds something almost as soon as they get into the forest and calls out to 2, but he's nowhere in sight. So what, did 2 just sprint off in one direction? Did he put in earbuds and start listening to some heavy metal or something? Did he leave the forest? Then, 1 goes off somewhere on her own, 2 magically returns, not out of breath or anything (so he clearly didn't sprint off somewhere) and not wearing earbuds either, and he can suddenly hear 1 from a place totally opposite the forest. Again, no spoilers, but somehow 2 hears 1 from that place. And even if you try to argue that 2 has bad hearing, in an earlier episode he hears a scream loud and clear from the other side of that very same forest. It just doesn't make sense. Some of you will call this a nitpick, but it stood out so blatantly to me that I couldn't help but address it. And besides, I can only ignore so many nitpicks before it becomes a problem and I have to start docking points.

The acting, please kill me, is awful. The children are horrendous. They're expressionless, character-less actors who have no talent. At one point two characters are arguing and one kid looks like he's about to fall asleep as he yells at the other character. That, or he's stoned out of his mind. Sure, he's underage, but that doesn't seem to stop kids. On top of that, Winona Ryder attempts to pull off the insane mother role, and it's clear that she's trying to be great, but she's not. I don't think Winona Ryder isn't talented, but she didn't pull off the performance she seemed to be trying to. Everyone else was pretty flat too, at least if they were important they were.

The characters these actors portray are even worse. They're unbelievably flat and boring. Each one can easily be described in a single sentence.

The show tries to make it look like it came out in the 80s, but its gets to be annoying with how hard it tries. It shoves all this 80s crap into every scene, and it feels like the Duffer Brothers are ramming all their 80s computers down our throats and movie posters up our butts. I think the conversation the Duffers had before the show was in their attic, surrounded by the stuff of their youth, and started like this: "Hey bro, what should we do with all this stuff from the 80s?" "Let's make a TV show" "Oh yeah, that's a great idea. But how will we get someone to produce it?" "Oh, we can just get Netflix to do it. They'll eat up anything, so long as they can make a couple bucks. Quantity over quality, like they always say" Furthermore, the 80s thing sacrifices a level of quality even. The first thing was a personal issue, not an actual flaw really. This is though. The CGI is awful. Painful even. Now I know, "It's trying to look like it was made in the 80s" but I don't care. The show proves that it knows what practical effects are, and whenever it decides to use those it looks great. But I can think of only a handful of times where it actually did that. So why didn't it use practical effects all the time? I don't know. It's stupid, though, that's for sure.

And the writing, oh boy. It ranged from okay to awful to flat out not making sense. And what's funny is that I think some of the actors knew that, specifically the main child actor. His delivery was so bad sometimes I wondered if it was on purpose. Like he knew that the writing was awful and was pushing the limits as much as he could to see how poorly he could act without the director noticing. Just for fun, I guess.

One more big flaw: the soundtrack. It switches between this repetitive, boring, and frankly annoying sound/noise and ill-suited songs. Seriously, none of the songs have any place in the show. At least not at the points they were used.

Overall Stranger Things sucks. Yet like I said, it was, for the most part, good enough to keep me watching it until the end. Will I watch the other seasons if there are more? Not a chance. At gun point, maybe. But not of my own free will. I don't get why people love this show so much, but if you do then go right ahead. Obviously I'm either missing something or I'm just not as easily impressed as most people or something. I don't know, but I don't really care. In the end I would not recommend this show.