141 Best TV Shows Similar to Stranger Things (Page 6)

R.L. Stine is best known for those iconic Goosebumps books, but those aren’t the only stories he’s written over the years. That used to be easy to forget about, but the entertainment landscape of 2021 has reaffirmed this longstanding truth. Thanks to titles like Stranger Things popularizing youth-friendly horror in modern pop culture, a series of recent adaptations of Stine’s other works (which fit into that mold nicely) has reminded us all of just how many different projects Stine has written for over the years. Continue Reading →

The ultimate representation both of making it, and of giving up, the soul-crushing blandness and hidden darkness of suburbia is a well drawn from many, many times. HOAs and smiling politely through block parties and feigning interest in rose bushes, moving to the suburbs is frequently painted as the end of adventure and creativity. What happens when the couple that moves to their shiny new house to start shiny new lives aren’t just leaving the city but also a trail of bodies behind? Can a relationship work when you’re not just newlyweds and new parents but are also trying your darndest not to murder any more people or each other? Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Pretty Peggy Johns (Sian Barbara Allen) wants to do her best for the environment. Yet while she rides her bicycle, bell-bottoms billowing, through the California hills to Elliot Mansion in Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973), the most ecological thing she does is star in the film, which is assembled entirely from recycled plots and recycled stars. Scream, Pretty Peggy and The Screaming Woman are two new-to-Blu-ray TV-movie thrillers from the early 1970s starring dames of Classical Hollywood. Each is a knowing hodgepodge of different Hollywood horror tropes that, instead of languishing in “hagsploitation” hell, allows its special guest star to shine. Continue Reading →

The third season of Laurie Nunn’s raunchy, teen dramedy Sex Education kicks off with a montage of the characters engaging in all sorts of sexual activities—some with their partners, some with their secret lovers, and some with themselves. For a show that’s always had a positive attitude when it comes to sex, it’s a fitting choice. However, Sex Education has never been just about hormones and horniness. Since its first season, the show has also proven to be a charming, often heartfelt look at adolescence. In season three, it remains committed to that approach.  Continue Reading →

Like its stars, Hulu original Only Murders in the Building, a 10-episode series focused on murders, podcasts, and murder podcasts, mixes the old with the new. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the often-light dramedy stars Martin alongside Selena Gomez and Martin Short, three tenants of a high-rise, upper-class New York City apartment complex. It attempts to appeal to the widest of audiences, from upstart New Yorkers to murder aficionados to TV-watchers who need their grandchildren to set up streaming services. And it (mostly) succeeds. Continue Reading →

It’s time once again to return to Sherman Oaks High as Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s bittersweet teen comedy Never Have I Ever returns to Netflix. Picking up right where season one left off, we reunite with Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), her friends, family, and the surprisingly rich cast of secondary characters.  Continue Reading →

HBO’s six-part docuseries Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes doesn’t have any shocking new revelations or unheard evidence. Some might ask what was the point of rehashing a story that broke in The New Yorker, which then became a book, which then became a podcast. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s take on Ronan Farrow’s already well-trod ground is clearly just for those folks who prefer visual media over books and podcasts (hey, no judgments) or for those obsessed with the investigation into Hollywood monster Harvey Weinstein.  Continue Reading →

Eleven months ago, nearly exactly to the day, I first fell in love with Ted Lasso—the show and, I suppose, the man too. As several people, including myself, have proclaimed, it seemed the perfect show for a population battered by the isolation and fear of what felt like a possibly endless pandemic at the time and, for Americans especially, the ugliness of a looming election. Lasso proved the wonderful good-hearted surprise so many of us were so in need of. Continue Reading →

Not all entertainment is for everyone. Continue Reading →

The Patton Oswalt-narrated Netflix docuseries tells a compelling story about the endangered birds' life during their molting and mating season. “Six hot months! One wild colony! No rules!” With this reality show-esque tagline, Netflix’s Penguin Town appears to be a quirky, comical twist on nature docuseries. They even pulled in comedian Patton Oswalt to narrate. Penguin Town follows the adventures of a wild cast of African penguins. As the series progresses however, dramatic events unfold, pulling the audience in for an emotional trip alongside the endangered birds. The series follows the journey of African penguins as they hit land on the shores of Simon’s Town, South Africa. Here the birds live it up amongst the “giants” (aka humans) of the town, molting their feathers, hooking up with their mates, and hopefully raising some hatchlings before they depart. This may sound like spring break for penguins, but their time at the beach is anything but a vacation. These penguins fight off predators on land and in the sea, attempt to survive catastrophic weather events, all in the hope their species will survive and thrive. Continue Reading →

After a four-year absence, Master of None returns to Netflix with a new tone and new focus, but it still grapples with the same emotional beats of the first two seasons. This time around, creator Aziz Ansari focuses his efforts behind the camera, only appearing in two brief cameos in season three’s five-episode arc. Instead, all of the action is focused on Denise (Lena Waithe) and her partner Alicia (Naomi Ackie), who are rusticating in a cottagecore fantasy that not even TikTok could call sustainable. Rather than the buzz of traffic and the cramped quarters of the city, we see Denise and Alicia’s relationship develop against the bucolic splendor of open fields and towering trees. Continue Reading →

On the heels of The Luminaries, Starz brings us another dramatic import, this time the Irish 3-episode miniseries Death and Nightingales, based on Edmund McCabe’s book of the same title and adapted/directed by Allan Cubitt. Set and filmed in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Death and Nightingales is one of those rare sunny day thrillers, a gorgeously filmed but raw story of a young woman trying to save herself amidst family secrets, Irish Nationalism, and an increasingly untenable homelife. Continue Reading →

In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to say this: I’m not a big fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s something about a show that is so unrelentingly grim—without even the occasional glimmers of light—that just makes me feel like I’ve been ground down into a salty meat paste. This is why I checked out of Game of Thrones before I even knew the words “Red Wedding,” because I couldn’t bear to watch Sansa Stark beaten, humiliated, and tortured anymore. So while I can say that Handmaid’s has strong writing and still boasts some of the most gorgeous photography of any show out there, I still don’t enjoy it. Can anyone say they actually enjoy it?  And when did the incessant castigation of women become primetime entertainment? Continue Reading →

In a lot of ways, I feel a bit sorry for The Nevers. A show created and conceptualized by Joss Whedon, former pop-culture wunderkind now revealed to be an abusive terror behind the scenes of some of his most high-profile works, it's already weighed down by the lodestone of its controversial creator even before it airs. Whedon left the show's production in November (presumably as a result of these allegations coming forward), the current showrunner position shifting to Philippa Goslett. Time will tell if Goslett will have the time or the opportunity to make the show her own and drag it out from the shadow of its provenance. But if the first four episodes provided to critics are any indicator, she'll have an uphill battle, as every bit of its worldbuilding and thematic concerns scream the kind of quippy, fly-by-night faux-progressivism for which Whedon's output is known. Continue Reading →

A thirty-plus-year veteran of film and TV scoring, Kiner's a chameleon who can work with the themes and motifs set by other composers and spin them into broader, more dynamic cues demanded by the rigors of television storytelling. That's borne out in his work for Star Wars, especially, where at this point he's written more music for the universe than John Williams himself -- while he finds moments to work in familiar motifs and themes, Kiner also carves out room for experimentation, which you can hear in the more synth-heavy scoring for Clone Wars: The Final Season. Continue Reading →

If you’re like me, you may be surprised to find that one of Netflix’s most enduring original franchises is Last Chance U, a documentary series chronicling football players as they juggle sports and academics. Though the show ended after a four-season run last year, Netflix isn’t one to let a recognizable brand name rest. Last Chance U has returned in the form of Last Chance U: Basketball, which shifts the focus from the Friday night lights of football to the indoor basketball fields of East Los Angeles Community College. Continue Reading →

While Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia (created by Sarah Lampert) has so far been hailed as a sort of edgier Gilmore Girls, the new young adult series arguably has more in common with Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990), starring Cher and Winona Ryder. In essence: what if Cher’s Mrs. Flax kept two pistols in the house? Continue Reading →

I am a great lover of camp media. I love the over-the-top, the ridiculous, the melodramatic, and the ostentatious. I love storytelling that delves so far into the extremes of the human experience that it departs from reality altogether. Unfortunately, camp can backfire, and when it doesn’t work, it can become so ridiculous that it’s hard to watch.  Continue Reading →

Following off the success of Bridgerton, the next bestseller to be spun into Netflix gold is Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes, a book that was so aggressively marketed around its super-secret third act twist that early readers were encouraged to use the hashtag #WTFthatending. They aren’t kidding. WTF that ending, indeed.  Continue Reading →

Netflix’s new romantic drama Firefly Lane, based on the 2008 novel by Kristin Hannah, follows the multi-decade friendship of brash and bold Tully (Katherine Heigl) and smart and nerdy Kate (Sarah Chalke). They meet at age fourteen living on Firefly Lane. From there they spend years cultivating their journeys: Tully is a journalist with a wildly popular daytime talk show, and Kate took a break in her career to marry fellow journalist Ryan (a stilted Ben Lawson) and raise a daughter.  Continue Reading →

The death of the brilliant, award-winning Swedish journalist Kim Wall made a worldwide headline in 2017, mostly because the details of her murder were so gruesome that it almost felt like a work of fiction. But in Tobias Lindholm’s The Investigation — a grim six-part miniseries based on the killing of Kim Wall — the brutality of that crime is never the main focus. Instead of trying to exploit the drama behind this tragedy, Lindholm chooses to focus on the other side of the story: the hard work and determination shown by the team of police who worked together to seek the justice that Kim Wall and her family deserved to have. Continue Reading →