The Stranger Things kids have become annoying with all their TV ads shilling products

The Outline

“I’m sick of the Stranger Things kids selling me stuff,” says Jeremy Gordon. “The sight of the Stranger Things kids pushing everything from Converse shoes to some Italian video player called the Casa 3 (they even invented a referential storyline, in which Will disappears again) felt more grating than usual, because it was too close to the way the show actually works,” he says. Gordon adds: “To see so many of these precocious children conscripted into such trickery makes me further distrust the insistence that this is all fun and games — that somehow a commercial can be amusing, or even good, when the fundamental concept is to hawk some sh*t to us by playing on our feelings…To watch someone like the talented Millie Bobby Brown make dozens of goofy faces to promote the Converse Chuck Taylor, as she does in one commercial, is the lie behind Stranger Things being exposed in real time — that if we can be made to feel this cheaply good about a shoe, then of course it would be the same for a monster show.”