If You Loved Stranger Things, Watch These Next

Look, nobody talks about Falling Skies enough. An alien invasion wipes out most of humanity and a ragtag group of survivors — led by Noah Wyle as history professor Tom Mason — fights back out of a Boston suburb. It has the same rhythm Stranger Things does at its best: a small community of people you actually care about, facing something way too big for them, with just enough hope to keep watching.

Five seasons. It ends. That alone makes it worth recommending.

If you liked the "there is something very wrong with time in this town" energy of later Stranger Things seasons, Dark is the German show that does it better than anything else on television. Four interconnected families in a small German town, a cave, and a time loop that covers multiple generations. It is genuinely confusing and genuinely great.

It's in German with subtitles. Don't let that stop you — the show is too good to miss because of font anxiety. Three seasons, complete story, satisfying ending.

This one's weird. A young woman who was missing for seven years comes back — she was blind when she disappeared, now she can see. What she says happened to her is either the truth or a delusion, and the show never fully commits either way for a long time.

The OA has that same "small group of people, inexplicable supernatural situation, what is even real" feeling as early Stranger Things. It got canceled after two seasons, which is maddening given where season 2 ends. But what exists is some of the most ambitious television of the last decade.

Different setting, different decade — but the same question Stranger Things kept asking: what happens when the normal world has something terrible hiding inside it? Severance follows employees at Lumon Industries (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry) who've had a procedure that splits their work and personal memories into two entirely separate selves. It sounds like a thriller about office life. It is not about office life.

Season 2 landed in early 2025 and is as good as the first. This is the show people will still be talking about in ten years.

Not supernatural, but soaked in 80s paranoia in a way that genuinely scratches the same itch. Two KGB spies (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) live as an American suburban couple in Reagan-era Washington D.C. while carrying out missions for the Soviet Union. Their FBI agent neighbor (Noah Emmerich) is starting to notice things.

Six seasons, one of the best finales in TV history. If Stranger Things made you nostalgic for the Cold War tension of the era, The Americans is the adult version of that.

The 80s tech boom, told through people building computers and companies in Texas. Less supernatural thriller, more slow-burn drama — but the period detail is extraordinary, and the ensemble cast (Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, Kerry Bishé) might be the best AMC assembled in the 2010s. It starts rough. Give it four episodes. Season 2 onward is some of the best TV of the decade.

If what you loved most was a group of high schoolers discovering that supernatural horrors are real and they have to deal with it themselves, Buffy is the template. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the chosen one, tasked with fighting vampires, demons, and the occasional apocalypse in Sunnydale, California — a small town built on a hellmouth. It's funny and scary and genuinely emotionally devastating at its peaks.

Seven seasons. The earlier ones are lighter. Season 2 and the back half of Season 3 are where it becomes something special.

FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) gets pulled into a division that investigates crimes with a paranormal or fringe-science angle — think X-Files, but with a clearer mythology and a much better ending. The supporting cast includes John Noble as a scientist who may have broken the universe, and Joshua Jackson doing some of the best work of his career.

Five seasons. The show is doing something very specific by season 3 that you won't see coming. Do not look it up.

J.J. Abrams directing a Spielberg-produced film about a group of kids in 1979 Ohio who accidentally film something they weren't supposed to while making their own movie. This is probably the most direct DNA match to Stranger Things that exists — the Duffer Brothers have cited it directly as an influence. It's 112 minutes. It absolutely holds up.

Three high schoolers gain telekinetic powers after stumbling on something underground. Found-footage format, surprisingly real emotional stakes. The back half goes somewhere darker than you expect. Worth watching before you know anything about it.