(courtesy IMP Awards)
SNAPSHOT
“Executive produces of Stranger Things welcome you to a new community.” In the sun-drenched expanse of the New Mexico desert lies The Boroughs, a picturesque retirement community promising its residents the time of their lives. But for new arrival Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina), paradise feels more like a prison. Everything changes when a terrifying nighttime encounter reveals that something monstrous is stalking the manicured cul-de-sacs. Dismissed by powers that be as another confused old man, Sam finds unlikely allies in a band of neighborhood misfits: a sharp-witted former journalist, a spiritual seeker, a cynical music manager, a brilliant doctor running out of options. Overlooked & underestimated, these unlikely heroes must band together to unravel the dark truth at the heart of The Boroughs… before time runs out…The Boroughs is a series created & showrun & written by the two screenwriters Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, both writers on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Life in a Year, and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim previously. With episodes directed by Ben Taylor, Augustine Frizzell, Kyle Patrick Alvarez. Executive produced by Duffer Brothers & Hilary Leavitt for Upside Down Pictures, Ben Taylor, Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews. With music by John Paesano. Filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (courtesy First Showing)
Gotta be honest here – straight out horror and I are not friends. Not even a little bit.
Which is why, much as I loved the first three seasons of Stranger Things, I couldn’t watch the final two season BUT, give me some horror-laced intrigue and some darkness at the edges of the light storytelling and I am there with boots on (hopefully not occupied by some creepy, crawly supernatural entity).
Which is why The Boroughs absolutely has me wanting to watch.
Am I little unnerved by the horror adjacent-ness of it all? Yes. But do I want to see what lies beneath the sunshine and loveliness of this retirement community? Absolutely, I do.
Maybe it’s growing up in the church, which looks so lovely and cosy on the surface but which is a viper’s nest for many people below the surface, but I relate to environments that aren’t what they seem on the surface because much as we want life and the places in it to be exactly as advertised, the truth is they often aren’t and this show looks like its going to make fertile use of that divergence between what we wish for and what we get.
The Boroughs premieres on Netflix on 21 May.