“The Boroughs” teaches us that adventures can happen at any age The producers behind the Netflix series are the Duffer Brothers of “Stranger Things”

Within the span of just a few months, Netflix released no fewer than three series featuring the Duffer Brothers as executive producers. The first was Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, a miniseries that was not particularly compelling and that joined a wave of works warning audiences about marriage. Around the same time, in fact, both The Drama and Ready or Not 2 were also released. The second was the animated project Stranger Things - Tales From 1985, which brought both creators and viewers back into the universe that made them famous through a spin-off story (created by Eric Robles) set between the events of the second and third seasons.

To round off a productive year, The Boroughs arrived on the platform, this time created by the duo Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews. It is the title most similar in atmosphere and premise to their Stranger Things, though with the protagonists’ clocks pushed forward into old age. A project that, in relation to the previous ones, ends up examining under the microscope the three stages of life: childhood turning into adolescence in Stranger Things, growing up and taking responsibility for the rest of one’s life in Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, and finally old age with all its inevitable ailments in The Boroughs.

Starting again from science fiction

Addiss and Matthews, however, do not simply place their characters inside a story concerned only with old age in itself. Featuring an exceptional cast including Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Denis O’Hare, Alfre Woodard, and in smaller roles also Bill Pullman and Jena Malone, the series instead reframes the protagonists’ age and what awaits them through the lens of science fiction, using the premise of aging as a way to reflect on the mechanisms of the extraordinary and its endless possibilities. In this case, clearly, with an investigative gaze focused on what is often the opposite of old age: eternal youth. The chance to live forever, carrying with it both wonder and inevitable nightmares.

Set within the districts that give the series its title, the characters begin tracking down monsters lurking in the underground passageways beneath their homes and which, through interference and glitches, hide a deadly secret more frightening than death itself. We did say it is the title that most resembles Stranger Things, didn’t we? The place where they live turns out to be a cover for a liminal zone between time running out and the promise of immortality, where old age is ready to take over and youth must be protected.

The protagonists set out to discover what is really happening, and this is where science fiction activates itself through their condition: if it is often difficult to be believed after witnessing something extraordinary, it becomes almost impossible when your words are attributed to confusion and delirium, with any ghostly observation dismissed as the onset of senility. It is an intuition that strengthens The Boroughs, which reflects on the passing of time, on how life is experienced, and offers rich material for the genre on which to build its story.

A winning narrative formula

Entertainment is not lacking either. The cast creates strong chemistry, the pacing feels just right, and the mystery is intriguing enough to make viewers want to discover where the characters’ investigation will lead. The protagonists follow a path already explored on Netflix by other elderly ensembles, as in The Thursday Murder Club, where Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie investigate a crime to be solved in true Murder, She Wrote fashion.

Even the atmosphere feels perfectly calibrated, from the inevitable echoes of a disturbing Stephen King-inspired past to the connective tissue provided by John Paesano’s soundtrack, which more than anything else recalls the great classics of fantasy and science fiction. A series that reminds us that growing old is not the end, but simply another stage in the circle we call time.