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Stranger Things is ten times the show either Game of Thrones or Westworld is, and it keeps getting better. I can't possibly keep up with all the eighties movies it references, but of the ones that I've seen it's better than just about all of them. The reason Stranger Things is better is that Stranger Things goes into fantasy from a base of reality, whereas the other two shows are trapped in their grim fantasies - places without relief or humans that behave like human beings, and just the barest whiff of humor. After a while, it just gets predictable and boring. Game of Thrones and Westworld couldn't sustain their concept because they frontloaded every idea they had in the beginning and the limitations just got clearer and clearer with every new twist that was exactly like the first. Stranger Things lets the darkness gradually seep in, until by season 4 it's overwhelming.
When fantasy and scifi are done right, they can be as great as anything in the world, but only when they're done right. They need to operate FROM a base of reality, so that we see the world of the imagination from people's lives, and why they imagine what they imagine. Otherwise, it's just escape from reality for people who find reality too grim - there's value in escaping from reality, but when you have a show or series of movies with lots of installments, the fanbase inevitably grows disappointed, and wonders why the fifteenth incarnation isn't as good as the first, the reason is that there are only so many times you can bank on the same conceptual ideas without letting human beings do their part.
So this is why Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro are great artists, it's why even Stephen King or Jack Kirby might be. It's also why George Lucas and George RR Martin are not. The reason Lucas and Martin have barely made anything in decades is that they can't find any idea that feels different than the ones they already had. It is so much easier to build a fantasy world than it is to make characters interact plausibly within it. People crave escape from life, and if you put the work in, you can entrance people with all the details of a fake world, but if you don't have a nose for how human beings interact with each other, the plausibility of the fake world always comes undone. So many groups of nerds seem to come out of every new sci-fi/fantasy movie disappointed as hell, and then go home and have the experience of a lifetime doing role playing games where they tell their own story and make the rules for themselves. When it's your own story, you don't worry nearly so much about the plausibility of a fictional world because that world only exists in the heads of you and your friends.
A self-sustaining thing that maintains quality over an enormous arc is sooooo much harder, and that's why Stranger Things is such a miracle. Time after time the Duffer Brothers recreates the world of 80s small towns exactly as they felt, they take chances on completely unknown young actors, surround them with production design and editing that's frankly better than a lot of the 80's movies they're paying tribute to, and use their alternate worlds not just as a cheap thrill, but as a projection to talk in depth about how trauma haunts us.
Think about all those deaths. Yes, Hawkins, Indiana seems to have more deaths than any small town plausibly did in those years, except... no they don't. The upside down from within the ground claiming lives? How different is that really from all the diseases spread by industrial toxins that seemed to turn whole towns into cemeteries overnight? What is the Upside Down but the world which small town America is turning into? A dark lord, or force, praying on teens with a history of trauma? Anyone whose traumatic experiences as a teen led them to bad choices knows that this is barely a metaphor. A demagorgon sent by the Soviets to kill along with Americans kidnapping kids and ruining their lives in the fight against them? Do any of the thousand metaphorical meanings there have to be spelled out?
Is Stranger Things ultimately as great as it sometimes seems. No, it's not Mad Men, and it's not supposed to be. The point is not that Stranger Things is some towering masterpiece of Art (though how close it gets is occasionally astonishing), the point is that so many fantasy/sci-fi shows/movies/books which are supposed to be towering masterpieces of art eventually fall flat, because they treat things that are supposed to stay silly with absolute seriousness, and the seriousness makes them far duller and more humorless and predictable than realistic shows where people can still behave like plausible human beings who can tell a joke. But because Stranger Things has that silliness built in from the ground level, it can get devastatingly serious and feel entirely real.
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