Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), sons Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Will (Noah Schnapp), and the orphaned Eleven have moved to a very E.T.-esque California suburb where Eleven is having trouble making friends, and doesn’t even have her powers anymore to strike back at bullies. Though the younger actors have all aged noticeably since we last saw them, somehow only six months have passed for the characters since Eleven defeated the Mind Flayer in a local shopping mall, and Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) appeared to sacrifice himself to close the latest gate to the Upside Down. It is also between 30-60 minutes longer than pretty much every movie that has influenced the Duffers, and those movies did not arrive with 10 and a half hours of preceding material that year. Without doing an exhaustive search, that appears like it will be the longest episode in American TV history - a half hour longer than the M*A*S*H finale that 105.9 million people watched, 45 minutes longer than the Lost finale, more than twice as long as the longest episode of The Sopranos. Netflix has also taken the unusual step of announcing the run times for the two July episodes, and the first is an hour and 25 minutes, while the second is two and a half hours long. That’s the new normal for Season Four, where the shortest of these May episodes is 63 minutes, the longest is 98, and the rest are all in the 70s. But it wasn’t until the Season Three finale that the Duffers went full Sons of Anarchy with a 78-minute conclusion. In its earlier years, Stranger Things was not exactly a breezy show, with each installment usually hovering close to a full hour. To accommodate all these people, places, and concepts, the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, have opted to supersize all of this season’s episodes. Brenner (Matthew Modine) and the very real mid-Eighties “Satanic panic.” government over what to do with the telekinetic Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) a more thorough examination of Eleven’s childhood as a lab rat under the supervision of Dr. Beyond the ongoing war between the monsters of the Upside Down and the kids from Hawkins, the new season adds a demonic serial killer called Vecna a clandestine civil war within the U.S. While a lot of the action is still confined to the town of Hawkins, Indiana - and its evil mirror dimension, which the boys once dubbed “the Upside Down” - the scope of the season is such that characters wind up at various points in California, Utah, Alaska, and the Soviet Union. The cast is bigger - both in numbers, and in height, where Finn Wolfhard’s Mike looks like he could play power forward for the Pacers. This delayed fourth season has been split into two chunks: seven episodes now, two more in July. Stranger Things, though, just keeps getting bigger. There have been other belt-tightening measures in recent years, particularly when it comes to how long shows are allowed to run, and how quickly cancellations are handed down. Employees have been laid off, and there’s a plan for a cheaper ad-supported subscription tier later this year to staunch the bleeding. Subscriber growth has slowed, and actual subscriber losses are predicted later this year, which sent the streaming giant’s stock price stumbling. Netflix is contracting Stranger Things is expanding. But as the Eighties horror pastiche returns this week after a nearly three-year absence, the show and the streamer seem to be going in opposite directions. Stranger Thingsis one of Netflix’s defining series.
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