Netflix’s new monster show, The Boroughs is set in a retirement community. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.
The Boroughs debuted this week at number two on Netflix, pulling a verified 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from over three dozen critics. That’s higher than every individual season of Stranger Things except its first.
‘The Boroughs’ synopsis
Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) is a former engineer, recently widowed, freshly relocated to The Boroughs: a sun-drenched New Mexico retirement community with perfect cul-de-sacs and a cheerful line in organised activities.
He doesn’t want to be there. He doesn’t plan to make friends. Something in the walls has other ideas.
Created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, who also made The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and executive produced by The Duffer Brothers, the show runs eight episodes of slow-burn horror mystery that earns its mythology by the finale.
The community’s charming CEO Blaine (Seth Numrich) and his wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) have been running a quiet operation: sending monstrous creatures up through tunnels beneath the property to feed on sleeping residents’ brain fluid.
The creatures are the offspring of a being (portrayed superbly by Nancy Daly) so old she’s forgotten her own name and what she is. Blaine and Anneliese call her Mother, and they are exploiting her biology for their immortality.
It’s a lot. The show handles it with more elegance than that synopsis suggests.
Sam’s new circle of friends include Renee (Geena Davis), a former band manager with a sharp mouth, and Wally (Denis O’Hare), who introduces himself by announcing he has stage-four prostate cancer and immediately becomes the most magnetic person on screen.
Judy and Art (Alfre Woodard and Clarke Peters) round out the group, a couple with more history than they’re letting on.
ALSO READ: ‘Glasshouse’ review: A haunting tale of memory and survival
That ‘Old Tech’ aesthetic
The show leans into the imagery of old technology, and it’s one of its smartest choices. The glitching just works.
Mother doesn’t speak. She transmits. Sam’s visions arrive as TV static, complete with flickering screens and signals cutting through interference. It’s the visual language of analogue noise and broken broadcast, and I absolutely love it.
Co-creator Addiss explained the thinking to Netflix’s Tudum:
“Mother puts out a signal, a sort of SOS, and that message gets picked up by people who are sensitive to it. Mother is transmitting a signal, and that’s why we played with the idea of old TVs and this idea of transmission.”
The choice to anchor the horror in that particular aesthetic, things that hum and glitch and refuse to behave the way they should, gives The Boroughs a texture that more polished horror often loses. There’s a reason the inside of a VHS player looks more interesting than it has any right to. The show seems to understand that.
A note from someone who took a VHS player apart at age 8:
There’s a specific kind of person who watched The Boroughs and felt the old tech aesthetic somewhere personal. Surely I’m not alone?
Not an engineer. Not even close. But the kind of kid (Hello, hi, me!) who took a VHS player and their Sony Walkman apart just to see what was inside, because the outside never told you enough.
The show’s obsession with transmission and things that hum and flicker in the dark hits differently if you grew up treating household electronics as a puzzle.
I don’t think it’s really nostalgia for a simpler analog time. Not really. It’s the kind of nostalgia you get from the feeling that if you looked closely enough at something broken, you might understand how it worked.
The Boroughs gets that. It uses old technology the way old technology actually felt: mysterious and worth investigating.
ALSO READ: Plaything: I can’t stop thinking about Black Mirror S7E4….
A neglected demographic
The show also takes seriously something that most genre television treats as background noise: what it means to be old, and what it means to be invisible. Society’s relationship with the elderly gets a hard look here, from quiet dismissal to outright erasure.
The residents of The Boroughs aren’t comic relief or collateral damage. They’re the entire point, right up in your face, front and centre. Addiss was clear about the intent, telling Tudum: “We didn’t want to feel like they were in danger. We wanted to feel like they were part of this story, because they are.”
The creatures slowly draining their brains are doing what the wider world does more quietly and politely.
And the appearance of Mother herself is also deliberate! She, for reasons I’ll leave to you to find out when you watch the show, took on a human form. Elderly and white-haired. And almost human.
Co-creator Matthews told Tudum: “We think of age as a little scary, a little other, a little alien, a little different. And you see this creature who is played by a woman [Nancy Daly].”
It takes fear and flips it entirely on its head because the monster looks like someone society would rather manage from a distance.
The ending (No major spoilers)
The Duffer Brothers gave Addiss and Matthews a clear piece of advice about closing a first season. Matthews relayed it to Tudum:
“You’ve got to tell a complete story so that there’s an emotional satisfaction to the end of the season, and then crack the door on the story going forward.”
Season 1 follows that note well. It closes with genuine emotional weight and gives Sam something the whole show has been building toward.
Then, in the final seconds, a single image leaves the door open in a way that fans of Stranger Things will immediately recognise the logic of.
Co-creator Addiss described it plainly: “[The very last scene,] where Sam [spoiler redacted], is a hint at where we hope to go. We wanted to have some fun.”
Season 2 hasn’t been confirmed but the creators say their story is set up to span multiple season. So, everyone, please watch it. Give Netflix a reason to confirm a second season!
All eight episodes of The Boroughs are streaming now on Netflix.
NOW READ: Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ hits hard: How Andrew Tate and the patriarchy fail men
