The Boroughs on Netflix: Ageing, death and monsters in retirement village sci-fi adventure

After you’ve made a wildly successful sci-fi series centred on kids fighting monsters, how do you follow that up?

By producing a TV show in which retirees battle supernatural monsters – and the cruelties of ageing and the fear of death.

That’s The Boroughs, a Netflix series produced by the Duffer brothers, they of Stranger Things fame, although the show was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.

The Duffer brothers involvement will be the big splashy headline, but the real assets of The Boroughs is its incredible cast, a collection of some of the best actors of their generation.

Hold onto that feeling of time slipping by, because that is woven through this story that balances adventure thrills and poignant themes. Ageing and death comes for all of us, and it’s folly to try and cheat it.

But really, if you throw Geena Davis, Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare together, you’d watch them do anything. Unravelling a conspiracy and contending with otherworldly creatures is just a bonus.

The story starts with former engineer Sam (Molina) who is moving in The Boroughs but doesn’t want to be. Living there was his wife Lilly’s (Jane Kaczmarek) idea but she recently died and he’s still deep in the throes of grief. He also has a contract with The Boroughs that he can’t get out of, and all his money is tied up in his new home.

The Boroughs is a planned living community in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert and tumbleweeds. It’s all designed and furnished in a mid-century modern style, which really gives it that “stuck in time” feel, along with that creepy fakery of a Disneyland.

Very reluctantly, Sam agrees to attend a barbecue to welcome him by his next door neighbour, Jack (Bill Pullman), where he also meets married couple Judy (Woodard), a former journalist and Art (Peters), retired music manager Renee (Davis), and Wally (O’Hare), a doctor who is battling terminal cancer.

Just as Sam was starting to at least not actively resist his new home, horror strikes and he witnesses a death caused by a monster that seems to suck the life out of its victim. It later presents as a medical episode.

There was also the oddity of being accosted by Edward (Ed Begley Jr), whose wife Grace was the resident in Sam’s house before him, and died violently at the hand of mysterious creature.

Something is lurking beneath the town and it’s killing people, and the chief executive of the enterprise, Blaine (Seth Numrich) and his wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) know something about it.

The Boroughs makes literal the fears we all have about obsolescence and the end of life – that we’ll all be shunted and hidden away in a special place when we’re no longer of any use, just waiting to die.

Our experience of time moves faster and faster with each moment, and what seemed like a handful of years ago was decades earlier.

Just as an aside, maybe it’s the fact that all these great actors are collected in one place in this particular milieu that has the effect of real surprise that this cast, except for O’Hare, are in their 70s.

When you think about some of their most memorable performances (for example, Davis in A League of Their Own), they were younger then than you might be now. That’s wild – not actually, but it is somewhat discombobulating.

What you can really appreciate about The Boroughs is that even though this is a story that is thoughtfully engaged in conversations about ageing and deteriorating health, it doesn’t just go for the cheap shot. It’s not all “oh, my knees!” but actually much more considered portrayals of what it might feel like.

Not all the characters are going through the same thing, and to have that diversity of experiences and how people reckon with it, is one of The Borough’s strengths. Fear of death is more villainous than death.

And it’s all wrapped up in this package of a supernatural adventure.

The Boroughs is streaming on Netflix