Because the default audience for horror is young and male, the genre’s archetypal hero is a blood-soaked babysitter, preferably in some state of undress. Maybe the appetite for manufactured jump-scares ebbs with age because growing older triggers so many real terrors. There’s the body horror of malfunctioning organs and sagging skin; the psychological horror of dementia or, worse, the condescension of people who treat you like you’re senile when you’re not; the supernatural horror of carrying around the ghosts of everyone you’ve lost. And, of course, looming death.
These frights all pop up in The Boroughs, a Netflix sci-fi horror series set at a retirement community in the New Mexico desert. With Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers as executive producers, it’s an empathetic take on aging that captures the pain of being discarded and the joy of finding late-in-life purpose and friendship. A cast led by Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Geena Davis, Clarke Peters, and Denis O’Hare embodies a refreshingly contemporary form of senior citizenship; instead of dozing off to Matlock, these boomers take psychedelics, do Springsteen karaoke, and practice free love. The trouble comes when creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (who previously helmed Netflix’s Dark Crystal series) try to synthesize all of their compelling characters and ideas into an overarching statement
We take in the Boroughs, with its retro eateries and golf courses, through the skeptical eyes of Molina’s Sam. The crankiness of the former aeronautical engineer can, in part, be attributed to the annihilating loss of his wife, Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek). She was the one who wanted to retire to this megadevelopment of identical mid-century modern cul-de-sacs. But her death didn’t void their contract, so Sam’s kind daughter, Claire (Jena Malone), delivers him to his new life in hopes he’ll adjust. A gregarious neighbor, Bill Pullman’s Jack, introduces him to a surprisingly fascinating crew. Ex-journalist Judy (Woodard) and her hippie husband, Art (Peters), are at a marital impasse. Renee, who used to manage bands, is a character so cool, only Davis could play her. A doctor struggling to accept his own terminal diagnosis, Wally (O’Hare) vows to fill his remaining days with “cocktails and chaos.”
The Boroughs offers a bottomless supply of both. A many-legged mystery monster is slowly killing residents, and the glamorous couple that owns the complex (Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg) seems more concerned with keeping up immaculate appearances than with investigating. Certain that going public with their fears will only get them confined to the Boroughs’ eerie nursing unit, Sam and his friends are left to defend themselves from whatever is preying on them.
Easily the best of the three Netflix series the Duffers have shepherded since Stranger Things ended last year (including the animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 and wedding chiller Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen), The Boroughs shares that franchise’s Spielbergian juxtaposition of horror and heart. The producers have also acknowledged a debt to Ron Howard’s film Cocoon, another sci-fi story set in a retirement community. Like that classic, the show excels at humanizing, through sharp performances by an all-star cast, characters Hollywood too often caricatures as cute or crotchety, when it deigns to pay them any attention. Even without monsters to fight, the denizens of the Boroughs would be a fun hang.
I do wish we got to know them a bit better. Sadly, The Boroughs also shares with Stranger Things a tendency to stop developing characters and relationships after efficient introductions. (The exception is Wally, a gay man whose memories of the AIDS crisis complicate his every choice.) Instead, both shows keep adding portentous but vague themes until so many ideas have been articulated that only the most anodyne takeaways survive. In this case, the horrors and the pleasures of old age are, finally, reduced to mushy platitudes: “Time is a gift.” “Why does anyone do anything? Love.” You’d think people staring down mortality would have more penetrating insights to share.
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