The fifth and final season of Stranger Things is about to air on Netflix after a wait so long only a show this big could have gotten away with it. What will become of Eleven, Mike, Will, Steve, and the rest now that Vecna has punched a hole through reality and is bringing the Upside Down to us? We’ll know soon.
But what about before? What about after? Stranger Things has brought us no end of strange, scary, supernatural twists over the years, but it’s not the first show to cover that kind of ground, nor is it the best. If you’ve enjoyed Stranger Things, there’s a whole world of dark, freaky TV shows out there to watch next.
Dark
Watch Dark on Netflix
Dark premiered on Netflix just a year after Stranger Things and shares some of that show’s DNA. It’s set in a small town where children start mysteriously disappearing, not unlike Will Byers. We get to know the members of four local families whose stories go back generations, and eventually get caught up in a twisty plot involving conspiracies, nuclear power, and time travel. Dark may not quite make it on the short list of movies and TV shows that try to get the science of time travel right (if that’s even possible), but it does use it to great dramatic effect.
Dark is a lot moodier, denser, and stranger than Stranger Things; there’s not nearly as much comedy, and what is there is pitch-black. But if you’re looking for a more serious take on small-town horror, you can’t go wrong. And if you finish Dark and want more where that came from, click over to 1899, another Netflix drama from the same people.
Twin Peaks
Watch Twin Peaks on Paramount+
Pretty much every supernatural show that came out after Twin Peaks was inspired by Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things is no exception. Again, we’re in a small town, this time in the Pacific Northwest. A young woman named Laura Palmer is found dead, and an offbeat FBI agent named Dale Cooper is sent to investigate. Without spoiling too much, the culprits are kinda-sorta from an alternate dimension, like Vecna from Stranger Things, but they’re way weirder and wilder.
Twin Peaks grabbed viewers by the throat with a fantastic pilot episode and became the kind of pop culture sensation we don’t see much of anymore. To be fair, the show isn’t as consistent as Stranger Things—things start to slacken a bit in the second season before ramping back up—but the scares are scarier, the laughs are bigger, and the whole thing is just fascinating. It’s a legendary show that every TV fan should experience at least once.
The X-Files
Watch The X-Files on Hulu
We’re going old school with a couple of these choices, but Stranger Things wears its old-school influences proudly on its sleeve, so I think it would approve.
The X-Files debuted in the early ’90s and follows a pair of FBI agents—true believer Fox Mulder and skeptic Dana Scully—who investigate paranormal activity. The X-Files produced over 200 episodes in its run, and that’s without counting the movies or later revival seasons. You could just watch the really good ones and still get more bang for your buck than with the entirety of Stranger Things.
And there were a lot of good ones, in a wide variety of genres. The X-Files could get as dark and twisted as it’s possible for a TV show to get, like in the famous episode “Home.” But it could also pull back and serve up laughs, like in the vampire comedy of errors “Bad Blood” (which was written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, by the way, who penned several great installments). There are also mythology episodes that tell a long, interconnected story. With so many ways to enjoy The X-Files, you’re guaranteed to get something out of it.
The Leftovers
Watch The Leftovers on HBO Max
We’re back to modern times with The Leftovers, a 2010s-era HBO show about what happens when 2% of the world’s population vanishes without a trace or an explanation. We stick around with those left behind. How do you grapple with something that enormous? What happened and what does it mean?
The Leftovers doesn’t provide easy answers; it’s less about solving the mystery and more about coming to terms with the nature of mystery itself. It’s a good companion piece to Stranger Things in that way; the heroes on that show run from place to place fighting demons and monsters, while the characters on The Leftovers must deal with an overpowering emptiness, a horrifying lack of places to run and monsters to fight. Things get real existential, real quick.
The Sandman
Watch The Sandman on Netflix
We’re going to come back to Netflix for one truly bizarre spinout out of a show. Stranger Things is about our small town heroes fighting creatures on the edges of human comprehension. I don’t even think Vecna would know what to make of The Sandman. It follows Morpheus, the embodiment of the concept of Dream, as he goes about his duties, providing a place where people can confront their innermost thoughts and feelings as they lie sleeping. Anything is possible in the dream world. Morpheus goes to hell and does battle with Lucifer, meets gods and goddesses, both powerful and long forgotten, goes to a serial killer convention, and tries to grapple with whether change is possible for an eternal being like him.
The Sandman is scary, funny, and almost too odd to function. It’s the least like Stranger Things of any show on this list, but is still worth watching for fans because it wants to expand your mind as much as it wants to entertain you. It’s an underseen gem that wraps up neatly after two seasons, and it’s waiting right now for you to watch it.
Claiming the Stranger Things crown
Stranger Things is one of the few shows today that’s managed to become widely popular in an age of increasingly fragmented audiences, and it’s no wonder everyone wants a piece of it. Some people think the new HBO show IT: Welcome to Derry is taking notes from Stranger Things, although since it’s a prequel to a book that came out long before Stranger Things, it might be the other way around.
Still, Welcome to Derry is yet another show that could scratch that Stranger Things itch before the final season drops its first cache of episodes on November 26, and hopefully after as well.
- Release Date
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2016 – 2025
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
- Directors
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Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Andrew Stanton, Frank Darabont, Nimród Antal, Uta Briesewitz
- Writers
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Kate Trefry, Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Jessica Mecklenburg, Alison Tatlock
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Millie Bobby Brown
Jane ‘Eleven’ Hopper
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Finn Wolfhard
Mike Wheeler
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Gaten Matarazzo
Dustin Henderson
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Caleb McLaughlin
Lucas Sinclair
