There aren’t many TV series that can drive a song to the top of the charts across the Western world. There are very few that can rack up half a billion hours of collective viewing time in just a fortnight.
And it’s not your average show that can push millions of people to step away from old-fashioned TV and sign up to new-fangled streaming services – as many of us found ourselves doing in 2016, to watch season one of Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’. Our grandparents did a similar thing in 1953, when they bought tellies to watch the Queen’s coronation.
We’re now on season four of ‘Stranger Things’. Every generation has a piece of portal fiction that captures its imagination. In this trope, heroic children stumble through some gateway into another dimension, which teaches us something profound about our own.
