The Boroughs - Timeless Rebels: The Over-60 Stranger Things?

Sam Cooper is a retired engineer, widowed a few months ago, who reluctantly moves into The Boroughs residential community, an apparently immaculate and timeless complex built in the New Mexico desert. He accepted due to the insistence of his daughter Claire, even though he considers this new phase of his life a sort of early surrender.

There he encounters a diverse group of neighbors his age, who live in those identical houses that characterize a sui generis suburb, where elderly residents are entitled to any kind of comfort, as long as they have the money to afford it. But as Sam will soon discover, the community hides something unsettling and frightening behind its facade, and when one of his new acquaintances dies under mysterious circumstances, he decides to investigate, forming a team of aged paranormal investigators.

Gallery

I've seen this before

"The owl is in the wall, the owl is in the wall" is the phrase repeated in a video call by the elderly husband of the first victim, in a prologue that immediately makes it clear that monstrous threats inhabit The Boroughs. The viewer already knows that something strange is hidden among those single-family homes with attached gardens, but will have to discover how and why in the eight episodes that make up the series, a new exclusive to the Netflix catalog. Dubbed by almost everyone, whether common viewers or industry insiders, as the Stranger Things of the third age, the operation fits into that genre of horror / fantasy for the whole family, recovering 80s atmospheres and iconic faces that made the history of that cinematic decade and the next.

The key role is entrusted to Alfred Molina, the unforgettable Doctor Octopus from Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, for a numerous and varied cast in which the timeless charm of Geena Davis stands out - who even carves out a "hot" scene at seventy years old - and the guest-star appearance of a wild Bill Pullman. But in general, main and secondary characters find the right interpretation from their respective actors, who perfectly immerse themselves in the amused mood of a story that doesn't take itself too seriously in mixing jumps, mysteries, and lighter moments, not without a veil of melancholy given the advanced age of the protagonists.

The minds behind the project

It's no coincidence, given these premises, that The Boroughs was released under the production banner of Upside Down Pictures, Matt and Ross Duffer's production company born from the ashes of the hugely popular series, which only a few months ago concluded its run. We thus find the grammar of the supernatural immersed in the American provincial environment, with showrunners Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews - whose signatures include the fantasy series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and the animated film The Lord of the Rings - The War of the Rohirrim (2024) - effectively managing this "new" variation on the theme.

What functions here as an emotional engine is experience, with the weight of years, the pain of loss, the fatigue of those bodies that, due to illness or the inexorable passage of time, no longer respond as they once did. "What to do with the time we have left" is the leitmotif, as highlighted in an exchange of lines already in the opening episode and which becomes the key phrase of the entire season. A choice not only commercially atypical, in a streaming era where the over-60 population represents a segment of the audience systematically ignored by genre series, but also narratively courageous: the characters of The Boroughs are not improvised heroes who still have to discover who they are. They are individuals aware of their own means, and above all of their ailments, who find themselves having to prove - to themselves even before the world - that they still have something to say and to give.

So, is everything that glitters gold? Not quite, because The Boroughs at times seems to pay for its excessively derivative essence and some subplots are less inspired than others, almost a consolation prize to give space to all the names involved. The pleasure of viewing is certainly not denied, but the impression is that the initial momentum progressively wanes as events unfold, with some dead time here and there and a cyclical nature on recurring themes that were already very clear to the viewer.