“I think the current people who are in charge of Netflix would not buy or make Stranger Things now. There's a very long development process happening now in television where you spend years basically sanding everything smooth before they let you start making it, which would not allow for a show as weird as the first season of Stranger Things to exist.”
Design Better · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Asked what he would do differently if starting his career over, the Stranger Things writer says the TV landscape has changed and the era of weird first seasons may be over.
Transcript
to go to work.
…line around setting the right conditions for creativity, maybe in sometimes intentional or conscious, other times perhaps subconscious. And I'm just wondering if you were to start this whole journey again from day zero, would your strategies be maybe any different to create those conditions?
Well, I think that the thing that the landscape of Hollywood has changed in the last 10 years that has made making a show like Stranger Things feel much harder. I think the current people who are in charge of Netflix would not buy or make Stranger Things now. And so I think that you'd have to do it very differently if I was starting now. I don't know if this is a weird way to answer your question, but I think you have to really be aware of the landscape that you're in. And there's a very long development process that's happening now in television where you spend years basically sanding everything smooth before they let you start making it, which would not allow for a show as weird as the first season of Stranger Things to exist. But other than that, I think it's the same formula that it's always been, which is a bunch of nerds and weirdos in a room with some whiteboards and some food. And I hope that that never changes. And I hope that it's always a human-led endeavor and not something else. And that as much as possible, you have the push and pull of this group of passionate nerds who are fighting for the best version of a story that…
So, I have
a question that's similar about the creative process. I'm sure, like many people here, there's not a shortage of creative ideas,
but selling them and getting them to kind of, you know, an endpoint. Do you have any advice or a process that you use to take your creative ideas to kind of advocate or sell them?
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