To give you all a little view into
the window of my personal life, I’m currently earning my Master of Business
Administration while working full time. After a stressful spring semester juggling
work and 12 credit hours of classes, I decided to take the summer semester off
for a break until the fall semester begins and enjoy some indoor leisure time binging
on Netflix. One of my binge sessions included watching the much-talked-about Stranger Things over the course
of four days.
The series is set in Indiana of the
early 1980s with four young boys whose past-times include playing 10-hour
campaigns of D&D,
talking over ham radio,
and riding bikes through the woods. One of the boys goes missing and his three
friends set out to find him, encountering shadowy government agents, monsters,
and a mysterious girl with psychic powers along the way.
Was it good? Very good! It doesn’t
quite reach that sublime level of The Wire or Breaking Bad, but
Stranger Things is extremely satisfying television.
What impressed me the most about
Stranger Things was its attention to the details of the decade in which it’s
set. Everything in this show reeks of the Reagan Era from the clothes,
to the soundtrack, to the interiors, to the camera angles. Even the titles in
the opening credits look like they were pulled directly from an 80’s sci-fi
paperback sitting haphazardly on the shelf of a used bookstore.
Given the show’s tremendous
success, I have to wonder whether its creators, the Duffer Brothers, or
Netflix knew that the 80’s setting would draw a lot of viewership.
In a recent article from Forbes on nostalgia
marketing, there is a quote from Gregory
Carpenter, the James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing
Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management in which he explains the psychological
need for nostalgia:
"People become especially nostalgic when they are anxious about the present and, especially, the future."
With the looming United States
presidential election in November and subsequent results, I suspect that more
people will turn to shows such as Stranger Things for comfort.
