Fans of the once-novel and interesting but now overhyped and over-merchandised Netflix series Stranger Things are noticing that the characters’ dialogue in the show’s now-ongoing fifth and final season has gotten considerably dumber, Kotaku reports. Many of these fans cite a January deep-dive on the company (be warned, this piece is a freaking black hole and a good one) by N+1 alleging Netflix execs instructed writers to make changes like “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow,” because viewers are staring at their phones or laptops while “watching” the filler-content-filled service’s catalog.
The series, which in development titled “Montauk” and set in the far-eastern Long Island community home to an abandoned military base purportedly to have been the site of some bizarre government experiments, was never truly great – and it was especially maddening that for some fucking reason the characters in the second season reacted with disbelief to the presence of interdimensional aliens in their town when that was what exactly fucking happened in the first season. Still it was charming, unique, and often pretty freaky on top of all the 80s nostalgia – not something to be half-watched and thus all the actual dedicated fans are pissed over this dumbed-down final season.
Two things can be true at the same time: That people don’t pay enough attention so why even bother especially because Spartan could have some downmarket AI chatbot like Perplexity crank out the rest of this paragraph and a significant fraction of the audience won’t even notice before they scroll down to post a resistance meme from 2019. Then there’s also that maybe Netflix should try to fix that on their end by making more movies and series that people actually want to pay attention to.
Like Mindhunter. That show was fucking great and those dickheads canceled it after two seasons because of production costs or who the hell knows what their bullshit story was. Although not 100 percent perfect, Mindhunter still demanded your attention because it was so freaking tense every minute. A sign of good content should be that viewers are constantly rewinding it back a minute or two to see/hear something they missed when distracted by a notification on their phone – the kind of data metric that Netflix 100 percent has access to. They know what works and yet they just mangled a fan favorite rather than risk offending the non-fans just putting it on in the background.