David Harbour Knows Why 'Stranger Things' Became a Pop Culture Juggernaut

When Netflix announced a live-action series The Witcher, the streaming giant was hoping to deliver the next Game of Thrones just as the HBO series ran itself into the ground. That plan did not work out as evidenced by Liam Hemsworth now filling Henry Cavill’s wig. What Netflix apparently didn’t realize at the time is that it already had a pop culture behemoth up its sleeve.

Stranger Things 3 hit the platform like a meteor in July 2019, but by that time, Netflix was millions deep into The Witcher, which would debut that December. Clearly, the world of Hawkins was the golden goose, and Stranger Things 4 would only cement that fact as it racked up insane viewership numbers. But don’t take my word for it. Just look at the up-turned noses of Film Twitter snobs, who hate anything with a whiff of popularity. The way they talk about Stranger Things, you’d think the show ran over their dog. Are people having fun? Shut it down!

Anyway, David Harbour was asked about Stranger Things’ success in a recent interview on how the show strapped a rocket to his career. His answer was unflinching. Via Variety:

I think, at its best, it really hits all the beats of character and story moving forward at the same pace, which is a difficult thing for a script to do. Usually, scripts focus on character or they focus on plot. “Stranger Things” will do both of them simultaneously in a very sophisticated way. The other thing is, we love “Star Wars,” right? We love “Lord of the Rings.” I think what “Stranger Things” is trying to do is, instead of rebooting “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings,” they’re taking the archetypes or the tropes — or the words and the letters, let’s say, and creating new sentences out of them. Hopper is Han Solo, is Indiana Jones, is Gandalf the Gray. There are these archetype tropes that just live in our subconscious cinematic lexicon and we love them. “Stranger Things” just reinvents them with Eleven, Hopper, Max. It’s not afraid to play those really strong power chords.

Stranger Things often gets dinged for aping The Goonies as if that’s an easy thing to do. Skeleton Crew tried to pull that exact same rabbit out of the hat, with the added bonus of actually being a Star Wars, and nobody watched it.

I’ll be one of the first people to say that Stranger Things told a complete and damn near perfect story in Season 1 that probably should’ve stopped there. The show pulled off an extremely delicate balancing act of combining The Goonies, Indiana Jones, old Stephen King miniseries, and a dollop of the ’80s X-Men comics. Again, that’s harder than it looks. However, as we know, the show kept going.

This is me spouting off now, but Season 2 was fine, Season 3 was a low point, yet to my surprise, Season 4 was surprisingly awesome. The show threw everything it had at building a mythology, and my God, it pulled it off. For as much as people crow about everything being existing IP, Stranger Things actually built something new. My kids are hooked, and I guarantee it’s something they’ll share with their own kids. As crazy as this may sound, David Harbour is onto something. This world and these characters have a very good shot of joining the ranks of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings as stories that lit imaginations on fire.

Or Stranger Things 5 really will be Netflix’s Game of Thrones and crash into a mountain. In which case, I’ll deny everything I just said. You’ll never prove it was me!