Shows Like
Shows Like Stranger Things, Now That It Has Ended
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 5 min read
Stranger Things is finished. Netflix released the fifth and final season in three parts over the 2025 holidays and the last episode landed on New Year's Eve, which means the question people used to ask between seasons is now permanent. Five seasons, forty two episodes, 2016 to 2025, and nothing else on Netflix's front page is going to replicate it.
Here's the thing worth naming before the list starts. Stranger Things was three shows at once: a kids-on-bikes adventure, a small-town horror story, and a piece of 1980s nostalgia design. Most follow-up lists treat those as one thing, so you end up with a monster show when what you actually missed was the friendship. So this list is sorted by which part you're chasing, and it deliberately reaches past Netflix, because half the best answers are somewhere else.
If you're chasing the small-town mystery
Dark (Netflix, 2017 to 2020, three seasons, twenty six episodes) is the closest structural match and the least comfortable watch on this page. A child goes missing in a German town with a nuclear plant, and the search opens a time loop that runs across three generations and four families. It shares the missing kid, the woods, the sense that the town itself is the antagonist. The difference is tone: Stranger Things wants you to feel ten years old, Dark wants you to draw a family tree. Choose it if you liked being confused and want to be rewarded for taking notes. Watch it with the original German audio, the dub flattens it.
The OA (Netflix, 2016 to 2019, two seasons, sixteen episodes) is the sincere sibling. A blind woman returns after seven years missing, with her sight back, and recruits five people to hear her story. It has the same suburban strangeness and the same tight group of misfits. It's also much stranger and much more willing to embarrass itself, which is why people either adore it or bail in episode two. Canceled before it finished the arc, so go in knowing that.
FROM (MGM+, 2022 to present, four seasons) is a town you physically cannot drive out of, with things in the woods after dark. It has the exact ensemble pull Stranger Things had once the town knew what it was up against, and it treats its rules seriously. It's also the only one here still running, so you get the ongoing-mystery experience rather than a closed box.
If you're chasing the horror
The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018, ten episodes) is Mike Flanagan's adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel, and it's really a family drama wearing a ghost story. Five siblings, one summer in a bad house, decades of damage. The sixth episode is built out of long unbroken takes and is the best hour Flanagan has directed. It scares you less with monsters than with grief. If Stranger Things's Byers family was the part that got you, start here.
Midnight Mass (Netflix, 2021, seven episodes) is Flanagan again, on an island of a hundred and twenty seven people where a young priest arrives and miracles start happening. It's slower than anything else on this list and much more interested in talking. Two characters deliver monologues about death that are better than most films manage. Pick it if you want dread rather than jump scares, and skip it if you need momentum.
Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020, one season, ten episodes) sends a Black family across Jim Crow America in 1954, hunting a father who has disappeared, and the human racism is scarier than the creatures. It got one season and deserved more. It swings wildly in genre from episode to episode, which is a feature if you liked Stranger Things's habit of switching between comedy and terror in the same scene.
If you're chasing the kids and the friendship
Paper Girls (Prime Video, 2022, one season, eight episodes) is the adaptation nobody watched, about four paper delivery girls in 1988 who get pulled into a time war and meet their adult selves. It's the closest anyone got to the bikes-at-dawn feeling, and the adult-self conceit gives it something Stranger Things never had. Amazon canceled it after one season and the story does not resolve. It's still worth the eight hours if you can accept that.
Tales from the Loop (Prime Video, 2020, one season, eight episodes) is built from Simon Stalenhag's paintings and it's the gentlest thing here. Each episode follows a different person in a town built over a physics facility, and the science fiction is used to say something about loneliness rather than to launch a plot. Nothing chases anybody. If the part of Stranger Things you loved was the quiet Midwestern melancholy underneath the monsters, this is the pure version of that.
If you're chasing the 1980s
Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014 to 2017, four seasons, forty episodes) is a period piece about people building computers in Texas in the early 1980s, and it gets the decade's texture right without a single synth cue asking for your approval. It starts as a Mad Men imitation and becomes, by season two, one of the best character dramas of its decade. No supernatural element at all, which is the trade.
Counterpart (Starz, 2017 to 2019, two seasons, twenty episodes) is a Cold War spy story where the other side is a parallel Berlin, and J.K. Simmons plays both versions of the same low-level bureaucrat. It's for the older sibling in the room who wants the sci-fi premise handled like le Carre. Canceled at two seasons but the second one ends at a real stopping point.
Yellowjackets (Showtime, 2021 to present) splits between teenagers stranded after a plane crash in 1996 and the adults they became, all keeping the same secret. It has the friendship-forever-no-matter-what current that Stranger Things ran on, turned rancid. Three seasons have aired and a fourth and final one is announced. It is much more explicit than anything above, so it's the wrong pick for a family watch.
How to choose tonight
If you want the missing-child mystery done properly, Dark. If you want to cry, The Haunting of Hill House. If you want the bikes, Paper Girls, and make peace with the ending that isn't there. If you want something still running, FROM. Where each of these streams changes; the title page on BingeNext shows current US options.
If you'd rather not comb through five apps yourself, our TV recommendation tool takes a few shows you already love and hands back picks with a reason for each and where they stream.
Topics covered: stranger-things, sci-fi, horror, nostalgia
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.