Praise the Demogorgon: Stranger Things' final season runtimes are shorter than feared
Fans want their Stranger Things episodes to be tight, economical, and not much longer than one hour apiece. The Duffer brothers are giving them what they want.
Courtesy of Netflix
The scariest thing about Stranger Things‘ fourth season was the episode runtimes. We weren’t the A.V. Club to notice that the bloated runtimes had an adverse effect on the show’s narrative flow. As the premiere of Stranger Things 5 approaches, the collective members of the Hawkins A.V. Club have spent months biting their nails at the prospect of another season filled with episodes that run upwards of 98 minutes—not to mention a two-and-a-half-hour finale. That’s too many Eggos for a single Stephen King fanatic. Thankfully, in hopes of quelling the slow wave of anxiety cresting on his TV show’s fanbase, Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer posted the “ACTUAL” episode lengths on his Instagram page earlier today, and let’s just say they’re shorter than last season.
In a post captioned “ACTUAL runtimes,” Duffer revealed that the first three Chapters of season five run 68 minutes or less. However, one can see runtime creep infiltrating his editing process because the part one finale (yeah, this Stranger Things is another split season deal) clocks in at one hour and 23 minutes. Is that a sign of things to come? Should we clear our schedules for part two? Please, Mr. Duffer, tell us how we should conduct our lives. We’re hopeless over here.
