Even before you see Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer listed in the credits for Netflix’s new sci-fi series The Boroughs, you feel their vibe. The show doesn’t hide the inspiration it takes from the same well of ’80s classics as the Duffers’ blockbuster drama. There’s the booming, John Williams-inspired score that backs up The Boroughs title sequence, the arid New Mexico landscapes that call to mind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the arrival of alien creatures — you don’t even need to know that the woman who plays Grace is Dee Wallace, an actual star of E.T., to connect the dots to the Steven Spielberg classic.
But while creators Will Matthews and Jeffrey Addiss agree that they love a lot of the same stuff as the Duffers, they took even more inspiration from what they call “second generation Amblin” — the movies made by filmmakers who had also grown up on E.T. and held on to that sense, as Matthews puts it, “that an adventure is worth going on because you might win.”
A key difference between The Boroughs and all of its forebears — well, maybe except for Batteries Not Included, which Addiss says doesn’t get enough love — is that it’s not about kids on bikes going on adventures. Think more Cocoon. The Boroughs stars Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Clarke Peters, Alfre Woodard and Denis O’Hare as neighbors in a retirement community who team up to investigate the cause of their friend’s death, which turns out to be both extraterrestrial and a very human conspiracy.
Addis and Matthews cooked up the idea for The Boroughs after an initial meeting with the Duffers, who were fans of their work on the short-lived The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance fantasy series. Now making something entirely original, the creators started with their characters and then built the tone around them, relishing collisions between figures like Molina’s no-nonsense engineer, Sam, and O’Hare’s sardonic doctor, Wally.
“If you watch our cold open, there’s about four different tones in three minutes,” says Addiss. “That was our sort of way of seeing, could we pull all of this off?”
Adds Matthews, “We knew we were pushing it.”
Golden Years
It’s one thing to convince a group of top-tier veteran actors to be part of your show — it’s another to give them the material to make it worth it. Addiss and Matthews say they wrote the character of Renee for Davis, assuming they’d never get her, until Davis’ agent heard they were looking for “a Geena Davis-type” and sent the script to the real deal. (“It’s such a Hollywood cliche moment,” Matthews admits.)
Peters, meanwhile, initially turned the show down, and joked on the set that he didn’t want to be 80 running around chasing monsters. By the time the show wrapped, though, Addiss recalls, Peters said in front of everybody, “I don’t know. I had such a good time, I kind of want to be 80 running around chasing monsters.”
“So we got him,” says Addiss. (Peters, 74, turns 80 in 2032, so plenty of time for future seasons of The Boroughs to make that happen.)
Each lead character on The Boroughs arrives with a rich backstory — yet another benefit of writing characters in their 60s and older — and each gets their moment to shine as they unravel the mystery buried within their seemingly perfect retirement community. Yona Speidel, who joined the writers room after three Emmy nominations for her work on Pose, said she immediately resonated with O’Hare’s Wally, whose sense of humor masks the deep sadness he still feels after losing so many friends to AIDS. “I used my experience with my LGBT ancestors and friends and elders and kind of whipped that into the fold of The Boroughs,” says Speidel, while admitting there was another, much simpler reason she clicked with Wally.
“When I came into the writer’s room and cracked a few jokes, the other writers made the mistake of laughing at my jokes,” Speidel, who wrote the show’s propulsive seventh episode, says with a laugh. “That kind of ended up becoming Wally’s voice. So my cynical gay sense of humor definitely got into the show.”
Addiss and Matthews assembled what they call an “old-school” writers room for The Boroughs, with a group of six writers plus the showrunners given what’s now considered a luxurious 20 weeks to crack the series.
“The point of a writers room is to have a perspective outside of your own. You need people, and those people need time,” says Matthews. “Efficiency isn’t the first goal in a first season because no one knows what the hell the show is except for Jeff and me. And half the time in a first season we’re like, ‘You sure this is the show?’”
The writers room also included James Schamus, the former head of Focus Features who’s a three-time Oscar nominee for his collaborations with Ang Lee. Addiss and Matthews speak about his presence with a kind of awe. “He just thought it would be kind of fun,” Addiss explains.
As much as Addiss and Matthews joke that they were discovering the show’s tone as they went along, Speidel credits them with writing a series Bible that served as an essential guide as the other writers took the story and ran with it. “Each writer got a different shot of creating something that was truly theirs, but also serving Jeff and Will’s original vision.”
Addiss and Matthews, of course, had their own personal connections to the characters — Addiss based Molina’s character on his grandfather, who was also a former engineer. More than anything, though, both the showrunners and Speidel agree that they wanted to make a show that felt universal, a sci-fi adventure that everyone in their extended family could enjoy.
“My cousins, my second cousins — I have a million cousins — and everyone is texting and watching the show,” says Speidel. Addiss says he’s not sure his mother and sisters ever actually watched The Dark Crystal, but he made The Boroughs specifically so they could all enjoy it together.
“We did want to be able to watch this show with our moms,” Addiss continues. “My mom is not a genre person, and I wanted her to fall in love with these characters because even the music they listen to is the music my mom listened to in the car. It’s a love letter to our parents in a lot of ways.”
Final Frontiers
You can probably credit The Boroughs’ forebear Stranger Things for the glut of sci-fi shows joining it in this year’s drama Emmy race. That includes Netflix’s Stranger Things itself, which ended its run in blockbuster fashion at the end of last year — the finale was released in theaters and earned roughly $25-30 million in concession sales; no traditional ticket sales were allowed due to the cast contracts. The Duffers’ series is looking to add more Emmy nominations to its total of 57 since debuting in 2016.
Prime Video’s Fallout is another past Emmy champ representing sci-fi in this year’s race, having earned 16 nominations — and a win for music supervision — for its debut season. Sharing some of that post-apocalyptic DNA, albeit with a very different vibe, is Hulu’s Paradise, which returned for a second season in January and added Shailene Woodley and Thomas Doherty to its expanding ensemble cast — as Woodley and Doherty told me recently, they were happy to join the party.
Anyone with an Apple TV subscription — or an FYC code to vote for them! — can catch a wide range of sci-fi adventures, from the giant kaiju of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to the future dystopia of Foundation to the off-kilter space race of For All Mankind, all now multiple seasons into their runs. (Apple also has Silo returning for a third season in July, so eligible in next year’s Emmy race.)
To tell how much sci-fi is still flourishing on television, you need only look at the raft of brand-new shows entering into the mix this year. FX’s Alien: Earth expanded the vast lore of the Alien franchise to a prequel set two years before the original 1979 film and taking place, as you might have guessed, on Earth. Sci-fi got very personal, meanwhile, on another FX series, The Beauty, in which a mysterious virus makes people beautiful, but with fatal consequences.
But possibly the wildest, and most acclaimed, new sci-fi series of the year has to be Apple’s Pluribus, in which Breaking Bad maestro Vince Gilligan imagines a world in which almost every human has joined an alien-powered hive mind. Well, everyone except a select few, chiefly Rhea Seehorn’s exasperated Carol. With a premise kept completely under wraps until the show premiered and getting only wilder and more expansive as the season went on, Pluribus will hopefully keep pushing the boundaries of TV sci-fi when it returns for a second season — though thanks to this wide range of shows, it’s unclear if those boundaries still exist at all.
