Without any doubt, Stranger Things has been one of Netflix’s most successful assets since the first season aired in 2016. The overachieving steed in the streaming giant’s stable has amassed hundreds of millions of views since then and is now turning heads with the final season. The creators of the show, Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, recently gave an interview where they talked about their early days on the show and how the sci-fi/horror series almost never got made.
The brothers were invited on The Tonight Show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, to talk about the final season and their journey with the show. Recalling going from studio to studio with the original idea, Ross said, “We had originally planned the show to be a one-season thing, and we were just shopping it around. Everyone said no to it. You see it in their eyes right away. You’re in there for 2 minutes doing the pitch, and it is just dead eyes. They don’t care.” Matt added, “Sometimes even less than two minutes. You just walk into the room, and it is just blank faces.”
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Ross continued, “Now it’s a successful show, but back then no one cared. It’s a show about kids which is not for kids. It is set in the 80s, and no one wanted a period piece, and we were just failures. It wasn’t a very sexy pitch, but Netflix said yes.”
The brothers had talked about this period of their life back in a 2016 interview. They told Rolling Stone that the idea of Stranger Things came while working on something different, also while being mentored by one of the greatest horror directors of all time. Ross said, “We’ve never asked to do TV before, and we’ve never met with anyone about TV before. Then [producer] Donald De Line told us he’d read our script for Hidden and asked us to do Wayward Pines. That became our training ground, and M. Night Shyamalan became a great mentor to us. By the time we came out of that show, we were like, ‘Ok, we know how to put together a show.’”
Part 1 of the final season was released on November 26, and it ended up being quite a thrill for the fans of the show. The second part is releasing on Christmas, with the final episode scheduled to be released on New Year’s Eve.
Stranger Things 5 is now Netflix’s biggest English-language debut ever. The fifth season achieved 59.6 million views in its first five days on its debut, making for the best premiere week for an English-language series ever on Netflix. It was also the third biggest debut overall after Squid Game’s season 1 and 2.
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Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, the cast of the show includes Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Gaten Matarazzo, Joe Kerry, Winona Ryder, and David Harbour.
