The scripts for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things began writing in August of last year. At this point, it was assumed that they were finished and, in fact, the Netflix series was ready to go into production: prepare the shooting and start recording in the coming weeks. However, the brothers Ross and Matt Duffer, the creators of the series, have stepped on the brake, delaying the production of the chapters.
The reason is as follows: with the writers’ strike affecting Hollywood, they don’t think it’s viable to work. “Writing doesn’t end when filming begins,” the Duffers reported from the Stranger Things writers’ account. “While we are excited to begin production with our incredible cast and crew, it is not possible during this strike. We hope that a fair agreement will be reached soon so that we can get back to work. Until then, over and outâ€, they argued.
At first, the platforms tried to make the series shoot normally, taking advantage of the fact that they had scripts already written and ready to be produced. The figure of the showrunner, after all, is a combination of scriptwriting and production tasks and, therefore, the showrunners of the ongoing projects should be able to work on their series and films, as long as they only carry out the production tasks.
But this normality longed for by managers has been cut short by pressure from the writers’ union, the WGA, and by the simple reality of creative jobs. There are shoots that have been interrupted by pickets outside the studios, with actors refusing to take part in the shoot in support of the writers, and there are others, like Stranger Things, that have had to be delayed because they don’t have writers on hand. the filming.
And it is that, even though the text is theoretically finished, a common practice is to introduce changes on the fly during filming, either because production needs it, because this conclusion is reached during a conversation between the scriptwriter and director, or because it is observed that a dialogue needs more strength or grace. Shooting Stranger Things without being able to change even a comma in the text, therefore, would go against the final result, the creative process started by the Duffers in the writers’ room.
It is not the first time that Stranger things has faced an unforeseen uncontrollable during the production of a season. In February 2020, production began on the fourth season and, with just two weeks of filming, the crew and cast members had to return to their homes: a global pandemic had broken out and television had had to close the sets. for health reasons.
It was not until September of that same year that the Duffer brothers and the cast headed by Millie Bobby Brown found themselves on set following the new security criteria that hindered filming. Consequently, the series could not return in 2021 as planned and was delayed until May 2022. The public, however, was eagerly waiting for them: with 1,352 million hours watched in its first four weeks, the fourth season of Stranger things consists of as the most watched English-language series in Netflix history.
