Stranger Things Is Over: 9 Shows That Fill the Hawkins-Sized Hole

Hawkins is quiet now. Stranger Things aired its final episode, The Rightside Up, on December 31, 2025, closing a run that began in 2016. The last season arrived in three parts, with Volume 1 on November 26, Volume 2 on Christmas Day, and the finale on New Years Eve. For ten years the show was the thing friends texted about the morning after. Now the group chat has gone quiet.

The world of Hawkins is not finished, exactly. On Stranger Things Day, November 6, 2026, Netflix released a Season 5 blooper reel and announced Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a live action prequel set in Marion, Nevada in 1955, due in 2028. The animated Tales From 85 returned for a second season on September 17, 2026. Those are real comforts. They are not new episodes of the show we loved.

So this list is for the gap in between. Nine shows that carry some part of the Stranger Things feeling: small towns with secrets, kids who notice what adults miss, strange powers, and mysteries that reward patience. Some are finished stories. Some were cut short, and we say so plainly where that happens. All nine are streaming now, and each one starts with a single episode that tells you whether it is for you.

1. Dark

If you only watch one show on this list, make it Dark. A boy vanishes in the German town of Winden in 2019, and four families start pulling at a thread that runs through 1986, 1953, and beyond. What begins as a missing child mystery becomes a time travel story about parents and children making the same mistakes in every generation. It is the most carefully built puzzle on this list, and it pays off. The BBC ranked it among the greatest television series of the 21st century, and its 8.7 IMDb rating is the highest here by a clear distance.

Dark asks more of you than Stranger Things did. The cast is large, the timelines multiply, and the German dialogue means most viewers will watch with subtitles. Give it three episodes. By then the shape of the mystery clicks into place, and the final season lands one of the most satisfying endings in modern television. Three seasons, 26 episodes, and not one wasted. Start here if you want the smartest show on the list.

Watch it with a notebook nearby, or at least with the family tree open on your phone. The show rewards viewers who track who is who across the decades. Skip it if you want something light. Dark is not light. It is the rare puzzle box that respects your intelligence all the way to the last scene.

2. The OA

Prairie Johnson was blind when she vanished seven years ago. She returns with her sight restored, a new name, and a story nobody believes. She gathers five strangers in an empty house and tells them about captivity, near death experiences, and other dimensions. The OA is the strangest show on this list, and the most moving. It trusts its audience completely, and it never explains itself twice.

Fair warning: Netflix cancelled it after two seasons, and the story ends on a wild cliffhanger. The creators had planned five seasons. What exists is still worth your time. Season 2 is stronger than season 1, and the final scene reframes everything that came before it. Watch it for the feeling of a story that swings for the fences, even if the last swing never lands.

The first episode is the hardest sell. It opens quietly and asks you to trust a storyteller you have just met. Stay with it. By the third episode the pieces start to move, and the dance sequence in the finale of season 1 is one of the most talked about scenes Netflix has ever aired.

3. Paper Girls

Four twelve year old girls deliver newspapers in a Cleveland suburb on the morning after Halloween in 1988. Then the sky turns pink, and they are thrown thirty years into the future. Paper Girls is the closest thing here to the early seasons of Stranger Things: kids on bikes, a 1980s setting, and a friendship that has to grow up fast. It is based on the comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, and it keeps the comic’s warmth.

The catch is the same as with several shows here. Prime Video cancelled it after one season of eight episodes, so the story ends midstream. What remains is a bright, funny, heartfelt eight hours that works as a weekend watch. The four leads are excellent, and the scenes where the girls meet their adult selves are the emotional core. Think of it as a great first season of a show that deserved more.

The show looks the part too. The 1988 suburb, the walkie talkies, the mall, and the robot in Larry’s barn all feel pulled from the comic’s pages. The cast was mostly unknown when it aired, and that works in its favour. These feel like real kids, not television kids.

4. Locke and Key

After their father is murdered, three siblings move with their mother to Keyhouse, the family mansion in Massachusetts. The house is full of magical keys. One opens any door. One lets you walk inside someone’s head. One turns you into a ghost. Locke and Key is the most purely fun show on this list, a family adventure with a dark edge, based on the comic by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez.

Unlike the cancelled shows here, Locke and Key got to finish. Netflix and the creators planned three seasons from early on, and the story ends properly in August 2022. That matters. You can invest in the Locke family knowing the ending is waiting. Start with the first episode, Welcome to Matheson, and see how fast the keys pull you in.

The keys are the hook, but the family is the reason to stay. Kinsey, Tyler, and Bode grieve in different ways, and the show lets each of them carry it. The villains are properly scary, and Dodge is one of Netflix’s better monsters. It is also the rare comic adaptation that gets better as it goes.

5. Archive 81

Dan Turner restores damaged videotapes for a living. A rich client hires him to rebuild tapes filmed in 1994 by Melody Pendras, a documentary maker who was investigating a cult in a New York apartment building that burned down. As Dan watches, the two timelines start to bleed into each other. Archive 81 mixes found footage horror with a love story, and the eight episodes move fast.

It was one of the first big Netflix shows of 2022, it hit number one in the United States, and it was still cancelled after one season. The finale leaves threads hanging, so go in knowing that. What you get is a tight, scary, well acted mystery with one of the best premises on this list. If you liked the tapes within tapes feeling of the later Stranger Things seasons, this is your next watch.

Mamoudou Athie carries the show as Dan, and Dina Shihabi matches him as Melody. The tapes feel real, grainy and half ruined, and the Visser building becomes a character of its own. James Wan executive produced, and his horror fingerprints show in the best scenes. The scares are earned, not cheap.

6. I Am Not Okay With This

Sydney Novak is seventeen, grieving her father, and quietly falling for her best friend. She also has telekinetic powers that flare up whenever her feelings boil over. I Am Not Okay With This is seven short episodes, each under half an hour, and it plays like a John Hughes film crossed with Carrie. Sophia Lillis is superb as Sydney, and the 1980s soundtrack gives it a familiar warmth.

Netflix renewed it, then reversed the decision during the pandemic, so the single season ends on a huge cliffhanger. The graphic novel by Charles Forsman gives the story an ending if you need one. Even without it, these seven episodes are a sharp, funny portrait of being a teenager with too much feeling and nowhere to put it. It is the quickest watch on this list, and one of the most honest.

Wyatt Oleff is great as Stanley, the oddball neighbour who becomes Sydney’s partner in crime. The two of them make a strange, funny double act, and the show never forgets that grief sits underneath the jokes. It is a small show, and that is exactly its charm.

7. Tales from the Loop

Mercer, Ohio looks like any small American town, except for the machine buried underneath it. The Loop is an underground facility built to explore the mysteries of the universe, and its experiments leak into ordinary lives. Each of the eight episodes follows a different resident, from a girl whose mother vanishes to a boy searching for his lost brother. The show is based on the paintings of Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag, and it looks like them: quiet, wide, and a little haunted.

This is the gentlest show on the list. There are no monsters chasing anyone down a hallway. The science fiction is a way to talk about grief, loneliness, and growing old. The music, by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard Morgan, does a lot of the heavy lifting. Watch it on a slow evening when you want something beautiful rather than something scary.

Each episode stands alone, so you can dip in anywhere. The opener, Loop, and the finale, Home, are the two to watch first if you are sampling. The cast includes Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce, and Jane Alexander, and every one of them plays it straight. Nothing here winks at the audience.

8. The Midnight Club

Eight terminally ill teenagers live at Brightcliffe Hospice, a manor with a long and strange history. Every night at midnight they gather in the library to tell each other scary stories, and they make a pact: whoever dies first must try to send a sign from beyond. The Midnight Club comes from Mike Flanagan, the mind behind The Haunting of Hill House, and it has his fingerprints all over it: patient dread, big feelings, and stories inside stories.

Netflix cancelled it after one season, but Flanagan did something rare. He published a blog post explaining the answers to the first season’s mysteries and his plans for season 2. So the cliffhanger stings less than it might. The show also set a record for the most jump scares in a single television episode, with 21 in the premiere. Come for the scares, stay for the kids in the library.

The stories the kids tell each night are episodes in miniature, each one a different flavour of horror. One is a ghost story, one is a slasher, one is a strange little fable. That variety keeps the season moving, even when the hospice plot slows down. Heather Langenkamp, the original Nightmare on Elm Street heroine, plays the mysterious Dr. Stanton.

9. The Society

A group of high school students return from a cancelled field trip to find their town empty. No parents, no teachers, no phones, no way out. The Society is Lord of the Flies with American teenagers, and it takes the idea seriously. Who makes the rules when nobody is in charge? Who gets food, who stands guard, and what happens to the kids who break the rules? Kathryn Newton leads a large young cast, and the show earns its 86 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.

It was renewed for a second season, then cancelled in August 2020 when the pandemic made production too costly. The first season ends with questions unanswered, and that is the honest truth of it. Even so, ten episodes of teenagers building a society from nothing is gripping television, and it shares Stranger Things’ best trick: a group of kids who have to become adults before they are ready.

The show is at its best when it stops asking how the kids got here and starts asking what they will do next. The food runs out. The guns come out. Allie, played by Kathryn Newton, has to lead people who did not choose her. It is a slow burn, but the questions it asks about power and fairness are the ones that stay with you.

None of these nine shows is Stranger Things. That is the point. Hawkins worked because it mixed so many things at once, and no single show carries all of them. Dark has the puzzle. Paper Girls has the kids on bikes. The OA has the wonder. Locke and Key has the fun. Pick the feeling you miss most and start there.

And keep the date in mind. Other Worlds arrives in 2028, set in Marion, Nevada in 1955, with a new cast and a new mystery. Until then, these nine shows are the best way to keep the Hawkins feeling alive. Start with Dark if you want the best show here. Start with Paper Girls if you want the closest match. Either way, the next great binge is already waiting.

John Smith

John Smith is the founder and CEO of Karaoke Machines Guru. He is a karaoke tutor and karaoke enthusiast and has been passionate about karaoke since he was a child. He also writes about karaoke-related tips, guides, and product reviews on this website.
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