The fifth and final season of Stranger Things landed on Netflix in late 2025, capping off an epic story nearly 10 years in the making. In an era where TV shows are spread out over a variety of streaming services, and it’s hard for any one series to become hugely popular, Stranger Things became a cultural phenomenon, a show you were either watching or had heard of. Now that it’s gone, there’s a hole in our schedules. What can possibly replace it?
TV executives are probably asking themselves that same question right about now, but you don’t have to wait for them to come up with something new, because there are plenty of options right on Netflix.
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Locke & Key
If you want something like Stranger Things but it’s less sci-fi and more fantasy
Locke & Key is a three-season drama about a family recovering after the traumatic murder of patriarch Rendell Locke. His wife, Nina (Darby Stanchfield), decides to move their three kids out of the city into their dad’s ancestral home, a big drafty manor house that just screams “haunted.”
And it is, basically. The kids soon discover a number of keys hidden throughout the house that can open magical doorways; one key lets them travel to any other door they imagine, another lets them open a door into someone’s mind, and so on. But a demonic entity also wants the keys for its own purposes, and it’s up to the kids and their friends to make sure it doesn’t succeed.
Like Stranger Things, Locke & Key is about a group of young people who have to battle an interdimensional evil while navigating the difficulties of growing up. The special effects are very solid, the mood can get pretty grim, and it even seems to be inspired by a lot of the same things that inspired Stranger Things, including movies like The Goonies and A Nightmare on Elm Street as well as the works of Stephen King; the original Locke & Key comics are written by King’s own son Joe Hill, so that’s not surprising.
That said, there are differences worth noting. While the concepts are inventive, the characters on Locke & Key aren’t quite as likable as the ones on Stranger Things, and the show has been dinged for leaning a little too hard into high school drama. The final season isn’t considered as good as the others, but that’s actually another thing it shares with Stranger Things.
Release Date
2020 – 2021
Directors
Mark Tonderai
Writers
Carlton Cuse, Aron Eli Coleite
All of Us Are Dead
Can you stay alive long enough to come of age?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that South Korea makes the best zombie movies. They’re great at zombie TV shows, too. All of Us Are Dead is set in a high school where the students suddenly find themselves dealing with the outbreak of a zombie virus. They must band together to survive while the government locks down the city.
The action is bloody and brutal. It almost never lets up over the course of the first season, to the point where you may want to take breaks between episodes. But you’ll keep coming back because you’ll want to see what happens to the characters, who develop into memorable individuals over the course of 12 episodes. Like the kids on Stranger Things, they’re a likable bunch, but watching them is more stressful because the show is actually willing to kill them.
All of Us Are Dead is definitely more intense than Stranger Things, but it covers some of the same coming-of-age themes, arguably executing on them more effectively. And while the kids aren’t battling evil demons from another dimension, zombies are threat enough.
If you haven’t seen this show yet, now could be a great time, since there’s a second season on its way to Netflix at the end of 2026 or maybe early in 2027.
Release Date
January 28, 2022
Network
Netflix
Writers
Chun Sung-il
Yoon Chan-young
Lee Cheong-san
Dark
If you want something like Stranger Things but it makes your brain hurt
If Locke & Key is Stranger Things for middle schoolers and All of Us Are Dead is for high schoolers, Dark is for graduate students. At least in the first of its three seasons, it does feel a bit like Stranger Things. Children in the town of Winden — think of it as the Hawkins of Germany — start disappearing. These incidents bring up old grudges held by four families who live in the town.
And then we get to the time travel. Citizens discover a wormhole in the cave system below the local power plant that allows them to travel to different points in time. We spend more time in these other timelines as the show goes on, and eventually in other worlds. Stranger Things only had one alternate dimension: the Upside Down. Dark has so many that it becomes nigh-unmanageable. This is the kind of show people create diagrams for so they can make sense of it.
For some people, the complexity is a deal-breaker, but the people who love Dark are properly in love with it. The show asks complex philosophical questions about free will, the tone is so heavy you feel it even after the episode is over, and the lore is so dense you’ll find yourself thinking about it during sleepless nights.
Release Date
2017 – 2020
Network
Netflix
Showrunner
Jantje Friese
Directors
Baran bo Odar
Writers
Marc O. Seng, Martin Behnke, Ronny Schalk
Louis Hofmann
Jonas Kahnwald
Lisa Vicari
Martha Nielsen
Andreas Pietschmann
The Stranger
Maja Schöne
Hannah Kahnwald
Further watching
None of these will scratch the exact itch that Stranger Things scratched, but they should help break the fall, and might even provide you with something new to get obsessed over. There are a few other good Netflix series that might also fit the bill:
- The Umbrella Academy is a four-season show about a group of superhero siblings who find it hard to move past their traumatic childhoods as adults. It’s both vulgar and violent as well as quirky and cutesy, an interesting cocktail.
- Sweet Tooth is a three-season post-apocalyptic drama about a world where “hybrid” people — part human, part animal — are feared and hunted. One lone traveler decides to help a hybrid child look for his mother. Meanwhile, other characters try to piece together what happened to the world and how to fix it.
- 3 Body Problem might be the smartest sci-fi series on Netflix, a heady drama about how humanity prepares for a coming extraterrestrial invasion. A second season is expected this year.
And who knows? The next great Stranger Things replacement might be around the corner, on Netflix or elsewhere.
