Stranger Things and the cult teen shows that grown‑ups can’t stop watching

Winona Ryder as Joyce in Stranger Things

NETFLIX

Stranger Things
Neil Fisher
The Proustian twitch that Netflix’s teen-horror show sets off for me isn’t anything to do with the nasty aliens with their frilly, gaping mouths, nor the callbacks to cult Eighties paraphernalia — arcade games, Dungeons & Dragons, whatever. It’s the living, breathing actress Winona Ryder, whose fairy godmother status in Stranger Things blesses the whole affair with an authenticity it would otherwise lack. “Are you ready for the Winonassaince?” asked The New York Times when sizing up the first series and Ryder’s full-blooded turn as the harassed mom Joyce Byers. Answer: hell, yeah. The actress who definitively nailed Generation X angst in Reality Bites, who inspired Johnny Depp’s “Winona forever” tattoo (post break-up it was altered to “Wino forever”) and who gave us Heathers is still a force to be reckoned with. Winona forever, we say, in permanent marker. (Netflix)

Kayvan Novak as Nandor in What We Do in the Shadows

FX/BBC

What We Do in the Shadows
Helen Rumbelow
What We Do in the Shadows is not an easy sell. It took me about four flybys of the sofa, where my teenager was staring at the TV, zombie-like, for it to catch my eye. There were vampires, but it wasn’t Twilight. There was the shak y-cam, “faux documentary” style, but it wasn’t The Office. Men in ruffs, lots of capes, New York — what the hell was going on?

Then I started to edge my way in. It’s basically a vampire version of any classic flat-share comedy, from The Odd Couple to The Young Ones. Four vampires who have been living together in New York for hundreds of years. Imagine how annoying that gets. Throw in some delicious gothic situational comedy and cameos by Tilda Swinton and it’s very funny indeed. What my teen doesn’t know and I do: it’s created by some of the New Zealand team behind Flight of the Conchords, which I was into when she was a baby. Shhh! (BBC iPlayer; Amazon Prime)

Sex Education
Ed Potton
There’s definitely something a bit weird about a middle-aged man (and woman, my wife loves it too) watching a show about the carnal proclivities of British teenagers. Yet — and I realise I sound like I’m protesting too much — the appeal of Sex Education is less about the bonking and more about the nostalgia. That’s partly nostalgia for my youth; Asa Butterfield’s gawky first attempts at sex struck an uncomfortable chord. “The show is for teenagers, but it’s also about being a teenager,” says Laurie Nunn, its creator, and I’ve definitely been one of them.

It’s also nostalgia for the pop culture of the Eighties. Because Nunn’s series, although shot and nominally set in a verdant corner of the Wye Valley, is soaked in the language of American high-school movies, with lockers for jocks to shove geeks against, A Flock of Seagulls on the soundtrack and a saturated colour palette straight out of a John Hughes film. I never went to an American high school, but they are almost as big a part of my adolescence as the school I went to. Sex Education knows this better than any other show. (Netflix)

Troll Hunters’ Jim and Toby

Troll Hunters
Alex O’Connell
I had animation fatigue. I’d sat through every Disney film, been sent mad by Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and just hearing the intro music to How to Train Your Dragon made me breathe my own special fire. So when a friend in a pub implored me to watch Troll Hunters — he had seen all three series with his kids — I laughed. Then, on a rainy day with a bored son and a sore head, I found it on Netflix. Now I know how Howard Carter felt as he opened the door to King Tut’s tomb and saw the glittering treasures.

Directed by the Mexican Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), and with such spectacular voice talent as Kelsey Grammer and Ron Perlman, it tells the story of Jim, an American schoolboy who is crowned troll hunter, the first human to have achieved this protective role as keeper of Arcadia.

The gangly teenager with a passion for Vespas must protect the good trolls from the bad — then smalltown America and beyond. The programme has a brainy political subtext and its references stretch from Peer Gynt to The Goonies via Spanish telenovelas. The script is smart, and Toby, Jim’s chubby ginger sidekick, is one of the funniest characters on TV. Thankfully, my son, who tests my Troll Hunters memory retention on long car journeys, likes it too. (Netflix)

Dawson’s Creek
Joe Clay
The overwrought antics of the floppy-haired budding auteur Dawson Leery and his close-knit circle of friends nursed me through many a savage Sunday morning hangover in the late 1990s. When the six seasons of the angsty teenage drama came to All4 in 2017 I binge-watched it again for that sweet hit of nostalgia.

Set in an unseasonably sunny marina near Boston, the show follows 15-year-old Dawson (James Van Der Beek) as he falls for the new girl in town, Jen (Michelle Williams), stirring a jealous streak in his tomboy friend Joey (Katie Holmes). Also in the mix is Dawson’s best boy friend, “bad boy” Pacey (Joshua Jackson), with the quartet delivering a convincing depiction of teenage yearning while speaking very quickly in long sentences. (All4)

Naya Rivera as Santana Lopez and Lea Michele as Rachel Berry in Glee

FOX

Glee
Roland Watson
It should have been unwatchable. Every angle of the premise warned of horrors within: adult actors pretending to be high-school kids; schmaltzy plot lines about against-the-odds success; preachy themes of inclusion; a cast assembled with all the subtlety of a Benetton ad. And singing. To songs that should have been left to curdle in the 1980s. Yet it managed to be constantly, compulsively, spine-tingling brilliant. How?

It’s hard not to fall for the assembled misfits and outcasts, and their guileless guru, Mr Schue, as he nudges them through struggles with friendship, belonging and worth to reach for their dreams by being themselves. Socially progressive plotlines involving teenage pregnancy and coming out to a parent are unblinking.

Each episode is so polished that it’s actually perfect. Even the imperfections (I’m thinking of you, Cory Monteith, and your singing and dancing, even if, sadly, you’re not around to answer back) are faultless.

Thanks to a kookiness of character that borrows from Twin Peaks and showstoppers that compete with West Side Story, the rehearsal room and stage of McKinley High buzz and dazzle.

The genius of Glee is that it’s so straight-faced about its implausibility and inevitability (sectionals, regionals, nationals — again!) that it is simply enormous fun. And we have the unexpected joy of being reintroduced to beltingly good songs by a bunch of losers (who are, of course, winners) singing their socks off. (Netflix; Amazon Prime)

Family Guy

FOX

Family Guy
Carol Midgley
I must say that since I decided life was too short to spend on Love Island (a mayfly’s life is too short, frankly) the main show I sit down to watch with my teenage daughter is Big Little Lies, which I know isn’t exactly “teen”. Prior to that it was You, Me and the Apocalypse, which I loved because it starred a) Rob Lowe and b) Mathew Baynton, who I’d first seen in the superb Horrible Histories, another programme meant for children, but that I used to watch with her and also alone, which is really quite sad. Yet the one show that still draws me into a room when she’s watching it (which is often) and has me transfixed within 20 seconds is a cartoon: Family Guy. After all these years it is still one of the cleverest (and sickest) shows on TV IMHO and, while puerile, it always makes me laugh because, well, so am I. South Park isn’t bad either. (ITV Hub)

The Next Step

TEMPLE STREET PRODUCTIONS

The Next Step
Alex O’Connell
Everyone needs a TV safe space, a place where you can hang with characters you can rely on to do exactly the same thing in each episode, following a narrative loop that comes around again every 22 minutes. The Next Step is that. I began watching this blissfully vapid Canadian show about a dance company of teenagers who, weirdly, all look about 45, about four years ago. Now my 15-year-old daughter won’t touch it with a ballet barre, but my 12-year-old, Dorothy, who fell for James, Riley, West and co at the age of eight, feels nostalgic towards it; it’s her TV madeleine. And I suppose I might feel nostalgic for the time when she didn’t watch it nostalgically while anticipating my future nostalgia, when she is 15 and too busy watching Love Island and ordering neon bikinis off the internet to be my Next Step buddy.

Watching the drama is a bit like lying in a warm bath listening to the shipping forecast with an eye mask on. But what bliss it is to watch West, the hip-hop dancer with a GSOH, do the B-twist (it’s complicated, OK?) again, worry only a little about a dancer’s career-threatening injury, muse pointlessly on whether the team will again make the national championships (they always do), and wonder if gutsy Riley will run the studio one day (hmm, reckon so). Chernobyl can wait. (CBBC; Netflix)

Skins offered sex, drugs and anarchic mayhem, in Bristol

CHANNEL 4

Skins
Joe Clay
I was in my mid-thirties when Skins came to the “yoof” channel E4. It wasn’t made for thirtysomethings, but I indulged anyway. It’s now accepted that the first few series are good, but back then, while my peers were having deep and meaningful chats about Boy A and Britz, I was rapt by the hot, happening young cast of Skins living the life of sex, drugs and anarchic mayhem that was (mostly) absent from my teenage years.

I made excuses for why I watched it. “It’s shot in Bristol, city of my birth, OK? I’m only watching it to say: ‘You can’t drive a Mini Cooper down St Nicholas steps!’ And, *serious face*, ‘It’s a breeding ground for upcoming British acting talent.’ ” But the truth is I watched Skins because I loved it. Still do. (All4)

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
James Jackson
Too many teenage shows aren’t fit to be seen with your kids, Sex Education (see above) being a case in point. Yet watching a show such as that on your own could feel a bit weird too. A safer bet is Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which isn’t going to embarrass anyone with sudden full-frontal sex scenes, but is clever and horrific enough to watch alone without feeling too infantalised.

It’s a reboot of the perky Nineties kids’ show with the sardonic cat, but now feels like a teen show as scripted by Dennis Wheatley with some intersectional feminism thrown in as Mad Men’s Sally Draper hexes teachers. “The dark lord is not the embodiment of evil. He is the embodiment of free will,” mutters the diabolical father amid a sumptuous pop-gothic aesthetic soundtracked by the Ronettes’ Be My Baby and Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. I suspect much of this is lost on the kids. (Netflix)

Clichéd dialogue and annoying characters cannot spoil the appeal of Pretty Little Liars

ERIC MCCANDLESS/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Pretty Little Liars
Damian Whitworth
Can we just be clear— dramas featuring and aimed at 16-year-old girls are not my usual Netflix fix. I go there for the Ken Burns documentaries and adventure movies.

As a family we don’t tend to watch a lot of teenage drama together. Indeed, we don’t watch very much together at all. On the rare occasions when my wife and I can persuade one of our children to watch TV with us, it tends to be a movie or an adult documentary. Most of their TV-watching is done in their rooms, and I get that. The potential for embarrassment when watching anything with Dad is just huge, and that is especially true of stuff designed for teens that he wouldn’t understand and would be almost certain to make toe-curling dad jokes about.

Yet I caught a glimpse of Pretty Little Liars, which my daughter is watching, and sneakily watched the first episode, only occasionally squirming. Some of the acting is terrible, the dialogue clichéd, the four main girls annoying, and the levels of hair flicking and pouting quite preposterous.

However, it is also a mystery and every character, as they repeatedly tell us, has a secret. The girls’ friend, Alison disappears, and a year later is found dead. Someone, claiming to be “A”, keeps sending the girls knowing messages. Who killed her? Who is sending the messages? Could it be one of the girls or one of their other friends? Or one of their parents? Perhaps the adulterous dad or the mother who has copped off with the investigating cop? Or the cop himself? Then there is the handsome teacher who has already snogged one of the girls in the toilets. Isn’t he a bit of a creep?

Somehow these questions trump the one I should be asking: why am I watching this nonsense? The answer to that is: next episode. Skip intro. (Amazon Prime; Netflix)

The new season is set in 1985 — you don’t say
By James Jackson

New Coke
You want subtle Eighties references? Then Stranger Things 3 is not for you. First up: New Coke — 1985 was the year of the doomed beverage, designed to rival Pepsi, but which was so hated it lasted only 79 days. In Stranger Things 3 New Coke is conspicuously guzzled and at one point a character waxes lyrical about it being “sweeter, bolder, better”. No surprise, really, since the show has partnered with Coca-Cola for a limited promotional run of the drink.

Phoebe Cates
Remember her? In 1985 this preppy actress was hot off the back of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Gremlins (1984) and the trash-tastic 1984 miniseries Lace, in which she spoke the immortal line: “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” More than once we hear one of the Stranger Things kids say that someone is “hotter than Phoebe Cates”.

Evil Ruskies
The Cold War was in full swing by 1985 and in Stranger Things 3 those dastardly Soviet commies are secretly unleashing merry hell in the shady science lab outside Hawkins, Indiana. The parallel here is the 1984 film Red Dawn, in which teenagers in a wholesome American town fight back against invading Soviet forces.

The music
The most shorthand, or groaniest, way of time-tunnelling to 1985 is, of course, through the music. We’ve got Huey Lewis, Howard Jones and, most obviously, Madonna, with Material Girl and Angel blaring out to remind us just who was the biggest pop star of the year.

Arnold Schwarzenegger
Who’s that reticent, relentless bad guy lurking about Hawkins, Indiana, with an Uzi? Essentially it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator mode. In 1985 Schwarzenegger was vying with Sly Stallone (Rambo is also name-checked in ST3) as the muscle-machine action hero du jour, with Commando a huge international hit.

The film references
Stranger Things’s Stephen King references are still integral to the show (the theme tune, the title font, teenagers coming of age to frisson of small-town horror). Yet now the references have expanded to David Cronenberg’s queasy early horrors — at one point a rat explodes into a pile of living entrails, offering fragrant memories of that inside-out monkey in The Fly — as well as the zombie schlock of the 1985 horror classic Re-Animator, with a nod to the score of Midnight Run when police chief Hopper (David Harbour) and Joyce (Winona Ryder) hit the road.

What’s on at the cinema
The new hangout in town is the Starcourt Mall — a bright, neon place full of Burger Kings and Baskin Robbins ice-cream parlours. The movies that the kids are sneaking into at its cinema are the 1985 touchstones Day of the Dead and Back to the Future. Just in case we haven’t noticed them, clips are shown.