I just got done watching Netflix’s original series, "Stranger Things," and it was pretty great, although given some thought it might be hard for me to say why. The story is a big mish mash of '80s movies plots, and the whole thing is filled with old tired out tropes: the main cast of kids consists of an average-ish nerdy dude, his token black friend and a slightly nerdier and more socially awkward friend who meet a fantastical friend of the opposite sex for main kid to fall in love with, and the main kid’s sister has a fling with the attractive douche kid in high school only to then feel something for the less attractive but realer guy.

Even if the was enjoyable, it would still be something to watch more as a guilty pleasure and less of the fantastic piece of television that it is, so what makes it greater than the OK string of stereotypes and lackluster plot I described it as earlier? Well that would be how it plays with and subverts those stereotypes and tropes as it goes along. Sure, the main cast of kids is delightfully generic, but they all have their own strengths and weaknesses that make them feel like actual people, and sure, the sister seems to move away from the douche kid and onto the kid the audience all knows is “the one for her,” but the show makes it a point to show that the first kid is actually not that bad of a dude — go through a redemption arc, and then get with the girl in end. This use and subversion of old tropes is what makes "Stranger Things" as good as it is.

Essentially, what the show does really well is understanding and utilizing nostalgia, nostalgia being a longing for something that was remarkable in the past, a feeling you get when you relive some event that happened to you that caused a positive emotional response. This feeling causes a lot of people to like something that taps into that. Remind someone of the first "Mario" game they played, and I guarantee they’ll get instantly reminded of all the fun they had playing that game.

So if reminding someone of a cool thing from way back when is a cheap way to get them to react positively, why doesn’t everybody do it? That’s because nostalgia is more complicated than that; what people remember isn’t just something they liked but how they felt when they experienced it for the first time, and because most mediums, in general, get better as time goes; revisiting something won’t elicit the same response. In order to truly capture someone’s nostalgia, you would have to make something that reminds someone of the past but is just as good in today’s standards as those things were in their time's standards, and "Stranger Things" does this perfectly.

Let’s start analyzing how they do this with the start of each episode, the first thing you see after the cold open re-hooks you into the series, the title sequence. The intro sequence for "Stranger Things" has a font that matches the titles of '80s sci-fi and mystery novels. This instantly strikes the memories of viewers who read those books when they were a kid, whether they consciously recognize it or not. Imaginary Forces, the company responsible for the theme, explicitly add errors and lighting defects consistent with title sequences of that era. The result is something that, by being done in digital, looks good by today’s standards but also builds on the nostalgia of people who grew up on those things.

"Stranger Things" does this with its characters and cinematography too. On the surface the characters seem par for the course for something like this, as mentioned in the introduction, but they slowly are shown to be something more. Lucas fits the role of the kid who pushes back from the group's goals, does this but does it in a believable way; his tension with 11 and the rest of the group are understandable and aside from that, he is shown to be brave and acts on that bravery when he needs to. Dustin is the more nerdy and socially awkward kid who fits the role as the comic relief, and while he does do this, he doesn’t make a joke in a tense situation, and all the punchlines are something you could see that type of kid come up with in real life. Aside from that, he is also the smartest and most self-aware kid in the group, making him both the archetype and something more.

This also comes up in the relationships between Nancy, Johnathan and Steve. Nancy is the attractive 3.5+ GPA girl who starts to roll with the tougher crowd only to ease away towards the more misunderstood Johnathan. Steve is the douche guy who takes Nancy out of her comfort zone for his own sexual gains, and Johnathan is the weird, reserved one who causes tension in the relationship and gets Nancy closer to him. However, Steve is revealed to be more of a normal kid who only sometimes overreacts and genuinely likes Nancy. In the end, Steve realizes what he did wrong and makes up for it; Nancy ends up still dating Steve but is still friends with Johnathan. This starting off as a “we all know where this is going” subplot, but then changing into something fresh is exactly what makes "Stranger Things" so good.