After watching the opening episodes of the German series DARK, it came crashing down upon me how tedious, unengaging and wearily familiar Stranger Things is. I am smack bang in that generation that grew up with John Carpenter, Stephen King, David Cronenberg, Spielberg, Joe Dante and every 1980s pop culture and social reference Stranger Things nods to (or perhaps relies upon) as it crawls along its way. Am I meant to be the target audience, or is it the generation after mine, which had and inkling of these films but instead had the misfortune to grow up in the 1990s and not see them there and then?

Or is it aimed at the (pre)teens of today for whom the 1980s are as old as the 1950s were to me? With only a vague sense of what the 80s were, this new audience might only experience a period piece that is quite slow (not slow-burn, but simply, tedious) and a bit old fashioned. It's not really that scary either, especially by today's standards.

Consider John Carpenter's The Thing from 1982: an original and (for a monster movie) intelligent reboot of a 1950s 'classic', for want of a better word. Carpenter took the paper thin sets and man-in-a-monster-suit of the original and employed (then) cutting edge effects and (then) shocking imagery to fully entrench the story in the present.

Stranger Things, on the other hand, retains everything: the look, the plot, the actors (Paul Reiser, Matthew Modine), the music, the titles, the effects and even the font, which has left a wave nostalgic graphic designers in a swoon. The problem with structuring a series as a complete, faithful recreation of those 1980s sci-fi/horror films, is that most of those films were not that particularly good to begin with. And in the 1980s, the essentially b-grade pay-off to any given plot was revealed after a blessed 100 minutes or so. With ST (and most of these overly long series) it takes 8-10 hours.

So my issue with ST is that it seems it's only aim is to emulate the feeling and the cliches of the 1980s sci-fi/horror genre without seeming to add anything more. It has no depth. It's all sauce. Every aspect is so familiar and so faithful to the original source, that it feels as though you are actually watching clips of films you have already seen, when you were 10 years old, that weren't that great, but you liked them because you were still a child.

The cast is earnest, but as with the everpresent juvenile casts of the 80s (that ST faithfully emulates), the limits to the acting abilities of an ensemble of pre-teens are often apparent. And any scene with Winona Ryder is simply painful.

If you haven't yet begun to watch Stranger Things, I recommend that you not start. Instead, head over to the town of Winden on the other side of Netflix and give DARK a try. It's not Germany's answer to Stranger Things. It's simply better. And they speak German. So it's good.