If you haven't checked out the Room 237 OST, check it out. If you like Stranger Things, you should like it.
And here's the Season 2 trailer, which premiered during the Super Bowl: Apparently the show will be back by Halloween 2017.
Geez, a 15-month gap between seasons? I really, really liked this show and hit the end of the first season and of course immediately wanted more. But even I feel like the show is somehow oversaturated in the pop culture sphere at this stage. I'm not sure *anything* is quite as good as some people say this show is. Can they keep the hype on this thing going for eight more months? I would imagine yes, but it's a bummer in general that this show can't even muster the usual 10 or 12 or 16 episodes, and only does eight or nine per season, then leaves *more than a year* between seasons even though the thing got a second season greenlight months and months ago.
Better Call Saul also pulled this stunt by delaying Season 3 to April. Man Men also split Season 7 into 2 mini-seasons a year apart. Are these kinds of shenanigans the price we pay for being able to binge-watch?
At least "Better Call Saul" is *slightly* better in terms of timing, as it aired once-per-week so that the gap between the end of Season 2 and beginning of Season 3 is only 12 months. Plus they do 10 per year instead of the 8 or 9 of "Stranger Things." But yeah, same basic thing. I'd say "Better Call Saul" is even stronger than "Stranger Things", though I'm not sure if that means "Saul" is more or less justified in delaying a new season! I get the "less episodes means higher quality" argument that explains short seasons of many TV shows now. I do think there's more to the story than that, though. The "two half seasons" thing is extra gimmicky, as shows like "The Walking Dead" wring *two* season premieres and finales out of each "season."
Do we know how long it took to produce Season 1? If it's going along at the same schedule, then it's pretty much business as usual. From my perspective, it just showed up as a new Netflix show one day and I didn't start watching until a few months later, but maybe it took years to get to that point. Things are a lot different when there are expectations and people are anxiously awaiting the next installment.
And that's one of many reasons why the Netflix "model" of release and viewing is weird and difficult to pin down. On the one hand, yes, many didn't start watching the first season until weeks or months after it "premiered." So the "wait" isn't as long for the second season. Of course, one could also argue someone can watch a *really* old show and have *no* wait before watching every season. Netflix (and Amazon) certainly want to be taken seriously and be thought of more as a studio/network than a "streaming content provider." If that's the case, then I think some folks are going to view their material, especially their *original* (and exclusive) material in a similar way as people have treated shows in the past, just in terms of anticipation and whatnot. I'm sure they have all sorts of stats and algorithms to tell them how long the can draw out a wait for a new season of something. I sometimes think they wait too long and surely some folks will lose interest, but you never know. I believe they super *rushed* out the second season of the gawdawful "Fuller House", and that tanked. Maybe they don't want to rush stuff out either. Though, that show was a very different animal from "Stranger Things"; I think "Fuller House" rode much more on morbid curiosity and quick nostalgia. I'm sure I'm not the only person who watched the first episode and then nothing else.
This is a great point and probably worthy of its own topic (if there isn't one already). Is there a benefit for Netflix or Amazon to wait until, for example, 10 episodes are all completed before releasing them together as a season? Compared to the traditional "trickle" version where they would instead release them in order 1-10 at a steady rate, let's say one per week. I have to admit that it's a both a little daunting to see there are many hours of a new show available all at once, and also like a kid after going trick-or-treating in that I want to eat it all immediately. It does encourage binge watching, and I'm wondering if that's exactly what Netflix wants. But like that kid on Halloween, at the end of it I usually have a funny feeling left in my stomach. Perhaps a bit of regret that I didn't save anything for tomorrow or next week.
I don't see that they need to keep the 'hype' going at all. It doesn't need it. I've avoided reading anything about the new season including not watching the new trailer. I just know that when it turns up, I'll watch because I enjoyed the first season so much. Simple as that. That is a longer wait than I would have liked for a very specific reason. A big part of the charm of S1 were the kids themselves. When the new season premiers, the kids won't be kids any longer. They would have matured significantly and visibly and so the show will have to adapt the tone accordingly, which might detract from some of the original charm. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
People still expect TV shows to be cranked out at the same pace, even though the quality of production values and writing/directing on TV has greatly increased, in many cases to near-cinematic levels (or in the case of writing, beyond). If Stranger Things had been a movie, nobody would be surprised if it took two years to make a two hour sequel. And yet people expect an eight hour TV series to be churned out within a year's time (but still be as good as the first season or better). I don't know if this is a reasonable expectation anymore.
There's a picture of them above -- do they look like they've grown up too much? The new season is set a year after the last one so it's not expected they will look the same age.
Yes, there is a tremendous benefit in releasing it all at once. Most of these shows are heavily serialized, almost extended feature movies, which means you need to pay attention scene by scene and episode by episode. In fact in many such shows the concept of an individual episode is almost meaningless because there is just a fluid progression of scenes even across episode boundaries. In order to fully follow such a narrative structure, you need to binge watch multiple eps back to back, otherwise you lose sight of details, subtle plot threads. characters, etc. It's like reading a book several chapters at a time. This is the very reason I wish that The Expanse or say Better Call Saul would be released all at once. These shows are also full of dense detail that demand your continuous attention. However, if the show is purely episodic in nature, then the binge model is less necessary (though I would still binge it). In any case, you can still choose to watch one ep per week if you want to.
Yes, that was my point, the kids will have aged and the tone of the story has to shift to accommodate this fact (not so much cute kid stuff), so S2 will have a different feel from S1 (at least that's my guess).
You can see in that picture they're a little older but it's not like they have become 6 foot tall 18-year-olds. They've gone from 12/13-ish to 13/14-ish.
I'm fine waiting a year or more between shows as long as the quality is good but when you facing a show about kids that just got into their teens you may want to quicken that pace bit as they will be in college in no time. That would most likely lose the appeal of the show if they are aging so fast due to the big gaps in filming. The appeal is their youth/innocence.
I don't think they're planning to carry Stranger Things on for years and years. They have said they're thinking of this new series more as "a sequel" than as "Season 2" (you notice the title appears as "Stranger Things 2"). There may not be any more.
