What do you get when you take a lovable ensemble of septuagenarian actors and cross them with the Duffer brothers? You get a direct glimpse of the Netflix genetic code.
“The Boroughs,” premiering on Thursday, is an innocuously pleasant hybrid of uplifting senior-citizen adventure and scary-monster horror show. But its defining characteristic is the Netflixian state of variable attention and lowered expectation that it induces in the viewer across its eight episodes.
Like Netflix’s “A Man on the Inside,” with Ted Danson, or Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” with Steve Martin and Martin Short, “The Boroughs” exploits the comic and sentimental possibilities of putting older baby boomers into action, and jeopardy, as crotchety sleuths. But it does that in bulk.
Of the eight primary performers playing residents of the sinister retirement community called the Boroughs, seven — Ed Begley Jr., Geena Davis, Alfred Molina, Clarke Peters, Bill Pullman, Dee Wallace and Alfre Woodard — are in their 70s, and the baby of the group, Denis O’Hare, is 64. Other 70-somethings in the cast include Jane Kaczmarek, Mary McDonnell and Anna Deavere Smith.
This ensemble of a certain age — and it is a decidedly accomplished and appealing group — engages in the audience-pleasing slapstick and patter we expect in geriatric dramedies. But it gets a more strenuous workout than usual because “The Boroughs” is a result of the production deal that Matt and Ross Duffer signed with Netflix after the success of “Stranger Things.” (They have since moved to Paramount.)
The series was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, who collaborated previously on animated “Lord of the Rings” and “Dark Crystal” projects. But the fingerprints of “Stranger Things” are all over “The Boroughs.” There are monsters in the retirement village, and they and their habitats are distant, lower-budgeted echoes of the earlier show’s creatures and their shadow realm, the Upside Down.
As Sam, the grieving, angry widower played by Molina, rallies the geezers to do battle, the harmony between the two shows is ever more apparent. The Duffers prioritized Spielbergian nostalgia in “Stranger Things” by setting the show in the 1980s; “The Boroughs” is set in the present, but its characters’ tastes and hobbies put us in a 1970s and ’80s pop-culture echo chamber.
“The Golden Girls” is on the TV, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen are on the stereo, and everyone knows about the Hair Club for Men. Sam, a former engineer, collects vintage TV sets, which come in handy when it turns out cathode rays can be weaponized against the monsters. Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” figures in the plot, and one of the more moving scenes involves the former radical played by Peters singing Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day.”
Another thing “The Boroughs” and “Stranger Things” have in common, unfortunately, is a tinny earnestness in their writing, which they try to make up for with so-so jokes and frenetic action. It was a problem that grew more irritating as “Stranger Things” grew more bloated and self-important.
In “The Boroughs,” it dampens the fun rather than killing it, but there is still that Netflix bulk-goods feeling, as if the emphasis were on getting product on the shelves. It helps that Addiss and Matthews keep things pitched at a lower, more amiable key. And the overall quality of the cast means that there are always people coming along whom you’re happy to watch, even if they’re just mugging or doing a funny walk. Or screaming. (I mentioned Dee Wallace, right?)
The ordinariness of “The Boroughs” doesn’t mean that there aren’t some time-tested horror-movie ideas kicking around in it — it’s a fairly amusing gloss on the notion that the people warehoused in retirement communities are literally having the life sucked out of them. And while the main characters fall into types like the aging stud and the aging hippie, most of the performers find a little extra personality around the edges.
If you’re going to follow a ragtag group of old folks playing the parts of teenagers on a quest, it helps to be in company this congenial.
