The Boroughs Netflix Review — The Duffer Brothers' Best Work Yet

 

The first scene that stopped me in The Boroughs isn't the supernatural one. It's quieter than that. Sam Cooper has just moved into his new retirement community after the death of his wife, and he's standing in his apartment looking at a box he hasn't unpacked. He doesn't open it. He just stands there. Alfred Molina does nothing for a long moment — and somehow that nothing is the most devastating thing in the first episode.

That scene tells you everything about what kind of show The Boroughs is. Yes, there's a creature. Yes, there are mysteries hidden beneath the desert landscape. But the series, which premiered on Netflix on May 21, 2026, is really about something harder to dramatize: what it feels like to realize that most of your life is behind you, and to figure out what to do with what's left.

<The Show Nobody Saw Coming>

The Boroughs was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer — the brothers behind Stranger Things. If that combination makes you expect something with Hawkins-style nostalgia and a neon-lit monster, you'll be surprised. This is slower, sadder, and more interested in its characters than any sci-fi series the Duffers have been attached to before.

The setup is deceptively simple: Sam, a recently widowed aeronautical engineer, arrives at a picturesque retirement community in the Arizona desert and almost immediately senses something is wrong. His neighbors — including Judy (Alfre Woodard), a retired journalist; Wally (Denis O'Hare), a doctor with a terminal diagnosis; and Art (Clarke Peters), Judy's husband who is losing himself to dementia — are vivid, complicated, and not remotely interested in being background characters. The threat they eventually face is real and dangerous. But the show is most alive when it's just letting these people talk to each other.

Rotten Tomatoes gave it 95%. That number is accurate.

<What Alfred Molina Does With Silence>

The decision to cast Alfred Molina as the lead is the show's most important creative choice, and it pays off completely. Molina has always been an actor who does his most interesting work in stillness — and The Boroughs gives him stillness in abundance. Sam Cooper is not a hero in the conventional sense. He's a man who has lost his reason for getting up in the morning and hasn't found a new one yet. Watching him slowly, reluctantly allow the people around him to matter to him is the spine of the entire series.

The ensemble matches him. Alfre Woodard brings a ferocious intelligence to Judy that refuses to be reduced to a supportive friend role. Denis O'Hare's Wally, who knows he is dying and has made a kind of dark peace with it, provides the show's most unexpected emotional gut punches — he's funny and frightened and dignified all at once. Bill Pullman and Geena Davis fill out the community with the kind of detail that makes a place feel inhabited rather than designed.

What the show understands, and what most sci-fi series miss, is that older characters are only uninteresting when writers fail to imagine them as full people. The Boroughs doesn't make that mistake once.

<The Creature, the Cave, and the Ending>

The supernatural element — a being the characters eventually call Mother — is handled with unusual restraint. For most of the season, it functions as atmosphere rather than antagonist: a presence beneath the ground, an explanation for why things at the Boroughs feel slightly off. When it finally becomes central to the plot, the show has earned the audience's investment enough that the sci-fi mechanics don't overwhelm the emotional ones.

The finale resolves Sam's arc in a way that is genuinely moving without being falsely optimistic. Mother's death — and the brief, impossible reunion it allows Sam with his late wife — lands because the show has spent eight episodes establishing exactly what Sam has lost and what it would mean to see her again. It doesn't linger. It gives Sam a few minutes, and then it ends, and Sam has dinner with his friends.

The final shot — Sam's reflection glitching in the mirror — leaves a door open for a second season. The creators have confirmed this is intentional, calling it a nod to the Stranger Things tradition of ending on a quiet, unsettling note. It works.

<Why This Show Matters Beyond the Genre>

Here's what The Boroughs is actually about: the way we decide, collectively, that certain people are done. The retirement community genre has always gestured at this — the sequestering of the old, the out-of-sight nature of decline — but The Boroughs takes it seriously. These characters are not charming eccentrics on the way out. They are people with unfinished business, unresolved grief, and a genuine stake in the future.

The show argues — without making a speech about it — that underestimating people because of their age is a failure of imagination. Sam Cooper solves a problem that younger, faster, better-equipped people couldn't, not despite his age but because of everything that age has given him: patience, loss, a willingness to sit with things that are too big to fix.

That's the kind of argument that takes eight hours to make properly. The Boroughs makes it beautifully.