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Netflix’s new series, The Boroughs, follows a small group of aging residents in a seemingly idyllic retirement community in New Mexico who discover that there are monsters dwelling in their faux paradise. They must band together if they’re to stay alive and find out the truth behind what’s really going on in The Boroughs.
That description may sound dark and heavy, but audiences should expect a far more optimistic and witty show – one that strives to recapture the feel-good, scary-fun qualities of 1980s Amblin-produced movies such as The Goonies and Gremlins. The Boroughs even features a big orchestral score by composer John Paesano, who studied under Amblin vet John Williams.
While a Netflix show going for Steven Spielberg vibes understandably makes one think of Stranger Things – the Duffer Brothers even serve as executive producers here – The Boroughs isn’t merely Stranger Things with old people instead of kids, as creators/showrunners Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews recently explained to IGN.
“We are definitely an homage in playing with that Amblin tone, and we take it as a compliment. I think where it’s slightly different [from] Stranger Things is [that] we’re not a period piece. We’re set now, modern day,” Addiss said, citing their show’s adherence to “the tone and feel and sense of adventure that permeates so much of Amblin. We really do think of this as an adventure show first and foremost. Now there’s mystery, there’s scary parts, there’s monsters, there’s all this stuff, but what you’re feeling is that group of unlikely heroes facing an impossible situation and unraveling a mystery. So in that sense, yeah, there’s a lot of Amblin in there.”
“Amblin’s just so hopeful,” Matthews said. “The movies wore their hearts on their sleeves. The good guys won, and that was not ‘cringe’ yet. It was still cool. And so that’s very much infused our worldview that the story can go to dark places and the heroes can face real challenges, but it’s a hopeful look at the world where the good guys win, not a dystopic sort of cynical view.”
Enjoy this exclusive scene from The Boroughs:
Although The Boroughs is an ensemble show boasting a stellar cast that includes Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, and Bill Pullman, the series is led by an actor whose first big Hollywood film role was actually in a Steven Spielberg film: Alfred Molina, who played Satipo – aka the “throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip!” turncoat – in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In fact, keep an eye out for an easter egg from that classic scene in one of the early episodes.
“The showrunners belong to that generation. They were hugely inspired by Steven Spielberg. We talked a lot about not just the movies that he made, but also the movies that he produced,” Molina told me. “They come with experience and a huge understanding of this particular genre. So any homages or any kind of sensibility [or] flavor that comes from the show that might be described as Spielbergian, I wouldn’t say it was deliberate. But I think in a sense it couldn’t be helped. It was inevitable in the same way that we’re all touched and imbued by things that mean something to us for whatever reason.”
Molina stars as Sam Cooper, a retired engineer mourning the recent death of his wife Lilly (played in flashbacks by Jane Kaczmarek) when he moves into the community. “The Boroughs is the fifth time that Jane and I have played husband and wife. We’ve done it twice on stage, twice on radio, and now this,” Molina said. “I think that intimacy, and our friendship and knowledge of each other, our understanding of each other’s rhythm and idiosyncrasies when we work, I think that helped us a great deal.”
Sam doesn’t easily make friends when he first arrives in The Boroughs, behaving like a Walter Matthau-esque grouch to his new neighbors and the staff. “That’s why you need someone so sweet and likable in real life, because then you could really push the grumpiness of the character and still love him,” Matthews said of casting Molina.
Addiss added: “You sense the humanity in Sam all the time. He doesn’t feel that angry [and] bitter even when he’s a grump. You can feel that goodness and broken heart, and that was important to us. We didn’t want him to feel caustic. We wanted him to feel like somebody you wanted to hug.”
Sam’s reluctance to make new friends starts to wane after he witnesses a mysterious creature killing a neighbor in the middle of the night. From that point on, Sam is playing detective. “He always, right from the beginning, has this feeling of suspicion about what’s going on [in The Boroughs]. It’s all a bit too bland, too perfect. It’s too saccharin for him,” Molina explained. “He starts off as the neighborhood curmudgeon, and then he ends up looking like he might be a prime candidate for the Alzheimer’s wing. There’s a journey there of despair and a kind of darkness, and I think that’s what underpins the story. I think it’s why Sam is a little heavy in the first two episodes to establish all of that. And once friends and neighbors start believing him and coming on board, it then becomes more of a team. That’s where the Spielbergian thing comes in, in a way. This sense of starting a gang or starting a team, having a vision, having a quest.”
While each member of the ensemble plays an important role in moving the story forward, Addiss called Sam “your eyes and ears into the world.” Lilly was the one who wanted them to retire to the Boroughs, but now Sam finds himself stuck there alone. “All he’s trying to do is get out. And in the process of trying to get out, he discovers that there’s something dangerous there, but also something worth saving, worth protecting.”
Sam and his new pals’ journey to discover the truth about the Boroughs mixes horror, humor, heartbreak, and family drama. “The hardest part was just balancing all the tones. It switches so quickly from scary to emotional to caper to funny to sad,” Addiss said. “That was the thing that scared us the most: How do we bring all these tones into one thing that feels cohesive so that you could switch as fast as the show does and not feel like you get whiplash, but feel like you’re on a journey?”
The emotional crux of The Boroughs – a story about mortality, grief, and finding purpose in the time you have left – is the relationship between Sam and Lilly. There are recurring flashbacks to their final moments together as they hold each other and slow-dance to the Bruce Springsteen song “Thunder Road” right before Lilly suddenly dies.
“It’s interesting that the song that binds him and his wife is a song of rebellion, a song of getting out of some shitty place and striking out without any sense of knowing where they’re going,” Molina said. “‘Thunder Road’ is all about – let’s just go. It doesn’t matter where [or] how. Let’s just get the fuck out of here. And that spirit is still in him a little bit [as he seeks to escape the Boroughs].”
“We’re the first movie or show to ever have ‘Thunder Road.’ It’s never been used in a movie or TV show before,” Addiss said, crediting the show’s music supervisor, Nora Felder, with making it happen. Springsteen’s camp “made a deal with us that incentivized us. It got cheaper the more we used it because they wanted us to use it more. They didn’t want it to just be a needle drop; if it was going to be used, it had to matter. We had to prove to them that it really is fundamental to the show and the character. ‘Thunder Road’ is a big part of this show, and it’s used a lot, and you’ll see [that] in the back half [of the season] even more.”
Should The Boroughs prove a success for Netflix, Molina – who has some action scenes in Season 1 – is open to doing a second season, joking that “I would love to have lots of scenes where I’m sitting down or lying down in bed. I’ve got this running joke with the showrunners. I keep saying to them, ‘Look, I’ve reached an age where I’ll let the youngsters do the running and jumping. I’ll just do the shouting and pointing.’ I’ve hit that age group for actors where I can start playing judges and senators and crusty old men behind desks going, ‘Go get them.’”
While Molina isn’t at liberty to say what exactly a second season of The Boroughs would cover, he said “the showrunners have been talking about certain themes that they’re looking forward to exploring, and they’re all very exciting. We’ve got these terrific creative, inventive minds behind the show, and it is a great recipe where you have writers who aren’t just really good at their jobs, but they’re also fans of the genre themselves. And so they will always serve it well because they’re not going to disrespect it in any way.”
All eight episodes of The Boroughs launch on Netflix on May 21, 2026.
Editor’s note: These interviews were edited for clarity.
