by Gill Pringle in LA
Imagine taking the supernatural mystery energy of Stranger Things but replacing the bike-riding kids with retirees living in a quiet desert retirement community – and you’ve got The Boroughs.
Produced by Stranger Things’ Matt and Ross Duffer – the series is created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews – starring a powerhouse of senior talent including Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare.
The show is set in a seemingly serene retirement complex in the wide open spaces of New Mexico, where a group of older residents slowly realise that something deeply unnatural is happening around them, threatening the whole concept of a peaceful retirement.
With David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ featuring heavily on the soundtrack, it’s clear from the outset that the show is taking a long slow wink at the entire concept of dotage.
To this end, the design team have created a sumptuous environment for our seniors to play in: “Because part of the trick with The Boroughs is that it has to be a place you want to live in – if it weren’t for that pesky monster problem,” says co-creator Matthews, having previously collaborated with Addiss on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
If retirement communities are usually portrayed onscreen as bland, safe, or sleepy places, then The Boroughs flips that completely, turning the environment into something eerie and unknowable.
There is something inherently unsettling about seeing older people, who society often treats as invisible, becoming the only ones aware that something catastrophic is unfolding around them. A bit like Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren in The Thursday Murder Club but with the emphasis on suspense rather than laughs.
The mood of the show feels somewhere between classic Stephen King adaptations, Twin Peaks, and Cocoon – if Cocoon had suddenly turned terrifying halfway through.
What’s clever is that the show’s horror seems tied directly to aging itself. Time, memory, illness, isolation, and mortality are all woven into the supernatural mystery, which gives the series an emotional layer often absent from sci-fi thrillers. Underneath the monsters and mysteries, The Boroughs seems interested in what it feels like to grow old in a youth-obsessed world.
Some fans have jokingly described the show as “Stranger Things for old folk,” but – beneath the jokes – there is a genuine curiosity because the premise feels original at a time when streaming television is often so formulaic and repetitive.
There’s an inescapable sense that Netflix knows this could become its next major genre obsession after Stranger Things. The comparisons are inevitable because of the Duffer Brothers connection, but The Boroughs doesn’t feel like a copy.
If anything, it feels like a more mature cousin to Stranger Things – slower, stranger, and perhaps more melancholy.
Remarkably, The Boroughs marks the first time Molina, 72, has found himself number one on the call sheet, despite a career spanning five decades including stand-out roles in Spider-Man 2, Species and The Da Vinci Code.
Furthermore, it marks the fifth time that Jane Kaczmarek has played his wife. “Yes, twice on stage, twice for the radio, and on The Boroughs,” says Molina.
“Several of us have worked with someone else in the cast before,” adds Davis, 70. “I did a sitcom with Alfre way back in the ‘80s. And Bill Pullman, I’ve worked with twice before this. There’s a lot of cross-pollination,” agrees the Oscar-winning actress.
The Boroughs is yet another surprising pivot in the career of the beloved Thelma & Louise and Tootsie star. “I decided early on that I didn’t want to just play the girlfriend of the person doing the stuff. I wanted to do cool stuff too, so I avoided being typecast,” she says.
When we meet with the cast and creators, Addiss and Matthews are still pinching themselves that they got their dream cast.
“It was a thrill. When you’re on set with the nonsense words you write, and then Geena Davis makes them sound good, and then you do this crazy idea, and then Alfre and Alfred make just the saddest, most intimate scene. And then, the idea that you can push it too far, and then Denis makes Wally a totally believable, lovable character,” muses Matthews.
“I mean, what they can’t do? How many people, day one on set, can you say: ‘I need you to do a three minute monologue alone to a bird’. And there’s one guy who could do that,” he says referencing Peters [below].
“And the other thing is, they are all so prepared, so present in every moment. What was so amazing to me, is that from the first scene where they were all sitting together, they just all were right there for each other. Genuinely, it was a privilege to watch,” adds Addiss.
The sheer joy of having an older cast is not lost on the creative duo; instead of scrolling their phones on every break, they would entertain one another with hilarious stories from their careers or workshopped scenes.
For Molina, having built an extraordinary career playing characters with wit, intelligence and vulnerability, The Boroughs allowed him to continue exploring unexpected territory. “I think it was a mixture of feeling confident enough to have ideas and expressing them – and then just knowing that you’ve been around the block a few times, you have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t work,” says the veteran British actor.
“But the thing came pretty much finished and polished, and it was very easy to slide into it. This was a result of several conversations with Will and Jeff regarding all kinds of detailed things about the character, and you know who he is, what he wears, what he likes, what he doesn’t like, and so we all got a chance to create our own back stories. So, when we got to actually put it on the floor, it felt very well prepared.
“Thanks to all the work that had been done on the script, when it came to finding a way to connect to it, that was all in there in the plot, it was in there in the character description, it was in there in the whole given circumstances of the character and what he’d been through in terms of his own life,” he says of his character, whose daughter has shipped him off to The Boroughs following the death of his wife.
“I’ve experienced some of that, so I felt I could relate to it, and that’s a gift for an actor. It’s also fun to dive in with nothing to hang on to, but something that needs to be sustained over a long period of time. It’s really helpful to have some landmarks, to get the things that you can lock on to.”
Molina believes that the show can provide a real a-ha moment for senior audiences. “All the characters have a need to be seen. I think that’s a huge thing for older people. When your capacity to earn money or when your journey through the world is somehow limited or hindered by something, illness or circumstance, you don’t just lose your material benefits, you lose your identity in a certain way.
“And in this place, in The Boroughs, that’s one of the things that is being taken away as well. And that’s what all these characters are fighting for,” he concludes.
Pullman, 72, appreciated the story’s sinister underlining theme: “I think it’s interesting that there is this weird metaphor that the monster is sucking the brain fluid out of these old people. There’s this sense of: what do the old people have? Experience, wisdom, knowledge, life, and history. And that ends up being a precious commodity, that the monsters suck out all this stuff and turn it into gold … literally spin it into gold,” he teases.
