If your holidays, like mine, were peppered with watching the final chapter of Stranger Things, you might have noticed the writing felt a little… worse this season. There’s been a lot of online chatter about this, poking fun at the many scenes in which characters describe what they’re doing and where, how they’re feeling, and their elaborate plans in seriously exposition-heavy dialogue. You know, the scenes like this:
Some fans have been speculating that this season fell victim to Netflix’s “second-screen” policy for certain shows, where writers are asked to tailor the script to a distractedly scrolling audience.
Netflix’s Own Policy is Why ST5’s Writing Suffered
byu/OliDouche inStrangerThings
Only insiders would know if the Duffer Brothers were explicitly told to “show and tell,” or presented with compelling data about their audience’s (dis)engagement, or perhaps just struggled to wrap up the five-season show in a way that satisfied the fandom.
Whatever you believe, you can learn all about “second-screen shows” in a previous blog post, radio interview, and article I wrote for The Conversation.
CLCF Co-Director & Postdoctoral Fellow
Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is a Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC).
