‘The Boroughs’ Creators Break Down Duffer Brothers-Produced Netflix Series

SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains some spoilers for Season 1 of The Boroughs on Netflix.

The second of two 2026 projects shepherded to fruition by Netflix and The Duffer Brothers’ shingle Upside Down Pictures, The Boroughs, has arrived on the streamer ahead of Memorial Day weekend, complete with sprawling mythology and an ensemble cast assembled to solve a mystery together.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance developers Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews created the series and serve as showrunners and executive producers. Matthews recalls getting the call from the Stranger Things creators after they formed Upside Down Pictures with Netflix and were looking for shows to produce, which served as a specific prompt for what became The Boroughs.

“We thought, ‘Alright, this is it. We’ve got to do a show that you could only do with the Duffer Brothers behind you, super arty and weird, and you need that muscle,’” he tells Deadline. “It was so pure. We were like, “Jeff loves monsters, and I identify as an older person.” So we, put those together, and were like, “We’ll do this show because we can only do it with the Duffers.” We pitch it to Netflix, and they’re like, “Oh, thank God it’s so commercial.”

Titles alongside the recently concluded Stranger Things that come to mind as references for the series are Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and Cocoon (1985). The story watches six residents of the titular New Mexico retirement community band together to investigate and fight back against a sinister force lurking in their homes and contributing to a mysterious phenomenon that is under surveillance of community leadership.

“We thought we were all edgy and stuff. And then you watch the show, and I think you’ll see, we’re not edgy. We’re super optimistic, open-heart people,” Addiss adds. “We definitely thought we were being far more like edgier than we are.”

In the below interview, Addiss and Matthews address the early death of one beloved character, easter eggs and references to past works, needle drops and the inner workings of the creatures that Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) and company meet in The Boroughs.

DEADLINE: Could you both talk about the inspiration for the show? Will, I read you kind of took inspiration from your grandfather…

JEFFREY ADDISS: Mine was the curmudgeon. I don’t want to hit Will’s grandfather with that label.

WILL MATTHEWS: My grandfather did have an unexpected third act, though.

MATTHEWS: We wanted to do an adventure show. One of the things [that’s] so great about Stranger Things is with characters that young, if a 13-year-old turns to you and says, “I saw a monster.” You don’t believe them, you dismiss them, you come up with a reason why you don’t have to take them seriously. And a lot of that applies to older people as well. So we thought, if you need overlooked, under-appreciated, unlikely heroes, why not go for this group? And no one ever does.

DEADLINE: I love A League of Their Own. And Geena Davis and Bill Pullman are in that. What was it like getting the entire together? All these iconic names, Jeffrey, is Sam kind of based on your grandfather?

ADDISS: My grandfather was a curmudgeon. Wore suspenders, that’s how he dressed. He was an engineer for Northrop Grumman for years and years. Was with my grandmother since they were in second grade. There’s a lot of my grandfather in Sam.

DEADLINE: I’m particularly curious about Wally, because I feel like he has an interesting arc, he’s sympathetic to the creatures at first, and then he gets a little greedy and wants to keep them alive, to save everyone. Could you speak to his trajectory and his character?

MATTHEWS: With Wally, we wanted to have a character who had a different perspective on death than everyone else. So all of the other characters are getting to that age where they start going to more funerals than birthday parties, where they realize they’re going to start losing more and more of their friends, where they see their generation starting to die.

We wanted to have one character who had actually already been through that, and so has a different relationship with this moment in life. It’s not the first time he’s seen so many of his friends die, and we thought he would start then being the most at peace. That’s why we gave him a terminal illness. He’s the most at peace with death. He’s the most understanding of, “This is the next step, and what are you going to do?” So that way, when he is tempted, it’s a more informed temptation.

ADDISS: It’s not just he can live longer, that’s the question underneath, how much. But he could save people. “They’re not using it right. I could.” That’s a noble temptation.

MATTHEWS: “They don’t know what it is to lose, but I do. They’re learning, but I know.”

ADDISS: Will and I came up together in New York in the theater scene. We met at NYU as actors, and so we were part of that generation right under where a lot of our teachers and the people right above us had lost so many people to the AIDS epidemic. We were studying in Chelsea, and it’s just a big part of the idea of losing a generation. So Wally was a lot of what we learned and understood and grew out of coming up in Chelsea.

DEADLINE: We can’t not talk about Renee and Paz and Art and Judy. Why pair Renee with a younger guy? His tattoos reminded me of Harry Styles. I don’t know if that was intentional?

ADDISS: I don’t know Harry Styles’ tattoos. Maybe it was intended by somebody else, but I don’t think by Will or I. We’re not that cool.

DEADLINE: There’s always the people that think, “They’re so far apart in age, how does that work?” What makes it work for them?

ADDISS: I would argue it’s very easy, when it’s Geena Davis, to explain why it works. Also, Carlos is not 20, if that makes sense. We tried to cast an age difference between them.

MATTHEWS: Well, with Renee, we really wanted to have a character, who, it seems like she has her life together. Everything’s fine. She doesn’t need change. She’s not looking for love. She was married, didn’t care for it. She’s having a great time now. She’s dating, not dating. She’s teaching her class. She’s not pining for, she’s not missing out on, she’s not wishing about. She’s just living.

And then this curve ball comes into her life, because so much of the time, love is presented as the goal, or the thing that heals, or the thing that you want, and that’s true so much of the time. But love can also be a wrecking ball, in a fun way, but when you have everything arranged just so and someone else comes into your life. We liked the idea of love as a little bit more chaotic.

DEADLINE: And then for Judy and Art, Judy had the side fling with Jack. Are they okay by the end? What were your thoughts there?

ADDISS: I think it’s gonna be a little complicated moving forward, would be my guess. I think that a lot of how complicated that relationship was is really a testament to Alfre [Woodard] and to Clarke [Peters], who Alfre in particular would remind us, “It’s different when you’ve been married for 44 years.”

Those two characters have been married almost as long as I’ve been alive, and here I am writing about it with a lot of other people, with Will, with a great writer’s room, but it’s different, and they really fought to make it more complex, to make it more nuanced, because that’s the reality of being married so long. A lot of their arc and what they have really did come out of the conversations that we had with them. They really had a big hand in shaping that relationship and those characters. So what happens next is a really good question. We hope we get to answer. Everybody please watch season one.

DEADLINE: I also love the whole idea that they are a progressive couple, and they would talk about revolutionary ideas. And yet, even when you do it that way, you’re still gonna have problems. Every relationship has problems.

ADDISS: That was the thing, the needle to try to thread was that they do have an understanding, but also she broke some rules within that. But they’ve also been married for 45 years, nothing is quite cut and dry. And the original version was more cut and dry, I will say. It was much more, Judy was having an affair, and it wound up becoming something more interesting and complex, but really thanks to the to the actors.

DEADLINE: I can’t not bring up the woman who plays Grace, who starred in E.T. I’m curious your philosophy on Easter eggs and nods to past work while still keeping it original and fresh?

ADDISS: You do the story first. There’s always a story reason for everything. You don’t add anything for the sake of adding it. We knew we needed Grace. We wanted to open with a scare. We knew we wanted to set up some story point things. And we knew we wanted to explain why this house was open, because we wanted that idea that Sam’s moving into a haunted house, so that when he opens the door, you go, “No, no, no, no! Oh no, it’s that house.”

 Then once you do that and you look at it, you go, “Well, Dee Wallace would be perfect for this part,” and she was fantastic for the part. It’s an added bonus. But we needed that character. We needed that scene, and we needed a great actress, and Dee Wallace is a great actress, so it wasn’t a stunt, but it could become a fun nod.

MATTHEWS: We needed someone that you cared about immediately because there’s not a lot of time to get to know the character, and you have to care when she dies. So part of that is just her face, her manner, her ability to communicate warmth. You just love her right away. Even if ou don’t remember that you remember her from E.T., you love her right away.

DEADLINE: I was so sad when Bill Pullman’s character died. Did you think of eliminating anyone else? Was it always gonna be him? How did that come about?

ADDISS: It was always going to be Jack. We needed to motivate Sam to start with, “I’m going to kill a monster to get to I’m going to [help] a monster.” The other thing we needed to try to do is, there’s always a haunted house problem, particularly in a TV show: “Why don’t they leave? They could just leave.” We were trying to create a motivation that made you want Sam to stay, that made you want him to not leave, to go on the journey.

So we had to create a character you loved so much that when they were taken, you would want Sam to stay in the haunted house. And so that’s why you hire Bill Pullman, because that dude is so charming and so lovable in that role, and so good in that role, that when he’s taken, you go “Sam, go kill a monster, go solve a mystery.”

MATTHEWS: And no one believed us that he was really dead, because no one wanted it to be true. So the first time Netflix reads it, the first time the cast reads it, the first time Bill read it, everyone’s like, “Yeah, but, you know, like he comes back.” “No, guys, the whole point is he’s dead. And everyone kept being like, Yeah, but, like episode four…” We’re like, “No.”

There was some notes we got. It’s like, “Does Jack have to die?” And we were just like, “There’s no show if he doesn’t.” There’s no show. But I think that’s just a testament to how darn charming Bill Pullman is.

DEADLINE: What goes into the goo and the drink, they have that whole bathtub full of it, and they also drink it. Can you talk about the lore there and how the creatures become more human as they drink it and that whole system?

ADDISS: It’s a whole system, we had to design a whole system that hopefully we could summarize in like two lines. So we thought of it like bees, right? The drones bring the nectar to mom, who turns it into honey. So we even made it look like honey, magical honey. That was the inspiration. We went through so much goo, so many goo trials. Poor Seth [Numrich] and Alice [Kremelberg] had to be in that goo a lot for that tub scene.

MATTHEWS: We told Seth, “It is food grade. It is technically edible. You’re safe, but please don’t eat it. Don’t try and swallow it.” And he’s just diving right in.

ADDISS: Alice in particular, was like “So I could eat it.” We’re like, “Technically, yes, but you shouldn’t eat it.” So that was how we thought about it, and we needed a system whereby the monster is the thing, but is also the thing that — “How can Mother be at the center of it all?” And so her blood becomes the thing, the kids become the bees. And you could start to put it together.

MATTHEWS: The bathtub scene is one of the few scenes that we got notes from Standards and Practices. They were like, “You have too many licks. He can’t lick her that many times.” So we had to cut down. And then we fought over each lick. I was like, “How is this our sexiest scene? Two monsters in a goo bath? And it’s like, “No, guys, it’s too hot.”

ADDISS: We really did go back and forth woth Netflix over the number of licks. We think we ended in the right place.

DEADLINE: Were there any particular needle drops you were gunning for right away?

MATTHEWS: Well, it turns out we’re the first TV show or movie to get to use [Bruce Springsteen’s] “Thunder Road” for real, real. It was a crazy idea, kind of a long shot, because, of course, it’s never done before. But, you know, it’s a great song. We knew we needed a song to make that karaoke scene in [episode] seven work. And we have the greatest music producer in the business, Nora Felder. She did such a great job in Stranger Things with “Running Up That Hill.” So she was like, “You know what, I’m gonna make some calls, “and she pulled it off.

ADDISS: I think we have a Spotify list of 2000 songs. It’s a lot of the songs that Will and I grew up listening to, for me, it was a lot of the songs my mom would sing in the car as this soundtrack. A bunch of them, a bunch of them were ones we called out early. A bunch of them were totally different. There were places we thought we’d have a needle drop, and then John Paesano would come in with that score. And we would go, “Oh, that’s better.”

RELATED: All The Songs In ‘The Boroughs’: From Bruce Springsteen To Bill Withers

He would ask for the chance to sort of go up against some major artist or major famous song, and he would win. And so it would become John Paesano’s score, because the needle drops are a big part of it, but also, I really want to give a lot of credit to John, our composer, because our score is really aggressive in a way that you don’t normally see, I think, in TV, as much now. We’re spiking cues, meaning somebody does a thing, and we are doing a musical flourish. It’s older school in a way that you don’t see a lot as much, particularly in TV anymore, and John walked a line where it doesn’t feel silly and it works, and it really pulls all the tones of the show together.

DEADLINE: Can we talk about the intro sequence too? I know that’s the main theme score. Did you have any say in the title sequence?

ADDISS: We worked really hard on the title sequence, and I’ll admit that part of why we did that is because the Stranger Things title sequence is so good. We do have the same company doing it — Imaginary Forces, which is fantastic. And we really did brainstorm, and John did a couple of different versions of the cues until we found the one that felt like the show and drove it in the right way. It was really a thing where we’d do a bit of the visuals, then we do the music, then we go back and do the visuals, then we do a bit of the music. So we traded back and forth, which took longer, but led to something we hope is fun and cool, but we put them both through it.

DEADLINE: Did the Duffer brothers give you any notes that really shaped the series?

ADDISS: It was originally a retirement home, not a community. And they were, like, they had a really good note that, that might run out on us. And so they were the first one to say community, and that was when that sort of clicked in.

MATTHEWS: They also had a really good idea about how to end the first season. We had a little more of a cliffhanger tying too much into what the season might be. And they were like, “Listen, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Tell a whole story and crack the door, but don’t tie yourself down to anything.” So I think it made the ending much better.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.