10 Best Shows to Binge While Waiting for the End of Stranger Things
Stranger Things has officially entered its final stretch. The first episodes of Season 5 arrived on November 26, but Netflix is spacing out the goodbye. The next batch lands on Christmas Day, with the final episode saved for New Year’s Eve. That gap leaves plenty of time to queue up a few binge-worthy shows while waiting to see how Hawkins’ story finally ends.
If you’re watching live, there’s now a gap between chapters. For fans who want to stay in the mood—without rewatching Hawkins again—there are other shows with themes that are just as interesting.
Dark
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Time travel stories often unravel under their own weight, but Dark stays disciplined while delivering real emotional impact. What starts with a missing boy slowly expands into a web of generational secrets connected to a wormhole beneath a nuclear power plant. The plotting is dense, deliberate, and deeply attentive to small details that actually matter.
Yellowjackets
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There’s no mystery about why Yellowjackets became a breakout hit. It combines elements of survival drama with slow-burning horror and delivers strong performances. The show splits its timeline between the 1990s and the present, following a group of crash survivors from their teenage years to adulthood.
Severance
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Many critics called Severance one of the most original shows of 2022. The premise: employees at a tech company split their work memories from their personal ones through surgery. The result is a cold, sterile world full of questions about identity, privacy, and control. Directed in part by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, the series uses its sci-fi concept to explore modern work culture in ways that are both creepy and fascinating.
Locke & Key
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Locke & Key draws from the comics by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez and blends family loss with unsettling fantasy. The Locke siblings move into their late father’s ancestral home and begin discovering a set of mysterious keys, each tied to a different power and a growing sense of danger. Some keys open doors between worlds, others reach inside the mind, and every discovery carries a cost.
The Midnight Club
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A hospice for terminally ill teenagers becomes the backdrop for ghost stories and something stranger in The Midnight Club. The patients gather each night to tell tales, some fictional, and others are suspiciously close to real. It explores mortality, fear, and what might come after death. Created by Mike Flanagan, it’s based on a novel by Christopher Pike.
The A List
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The A List starts as a familiar teen drama and slowly drifts into something more unsettling. A group of students arrives at a summer camp on Peregrine Island, where the atmosphere begins to shift in quiet, disturbing ways. One camper appears to exert an unusual influence over the rest, and as the season unfolds, a sci-fi explanation emerges that gives the story a much darker edge than it first suggests.
Dead Boy Detectives
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Based on characters from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman universe, Dead Boy Detectives gives supernatural investigation a youthful spin. Two ghostly teens solve cases involving spirits who can’t move on, aided by living friends with their own baggage. The script balances its macabre setting with humor and charm.
Archive 81
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In Archive 81, a video archivist is hired to restore a batch of damaged tapes. As he digs into the footage, he becomes obsessed with the filmmaker who recorded them and the cult she uncovered. The story mixes found-footage tension with supernatural mystery. While only one season aired, it left a strong impression with its atmosphere and structure.
The Society
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High school students return home from a canceled field trip to find their town completely empty. Phones stop working, and no one outside can reach them. In The Society, they’re left to govern themselves and figure out what happened. The story feels like a modern allegory about power, rules, and collective responsibility.
I Am Not Okay With This
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Grief, identity, and teenage rage take physical form in I Am Not Okay With This. Sydney, a 17-year-old girl in Pennsylvania, struggles to manage her emotions after the loss of her father. When she begins developing telekinetic powers, things escalate quickly. The show avoids melodrama and focuses on how intense feelings can isolate someone.