Have we gone too far with Stranger Things 2 and its publicity?

Stranger Things 2 is finally out today, everyone is already talking about it, and the problem really is that everyone’s been talking about it for months.

Full disclosure here, readers. This writer has plans to binge-watch Stranger Things 2 this weekend, like many of you probably do. I’m excited to see what Hawkins has to offer in 1984. But, after months and months of speculation, it seems as though we’ve all built up Stranger Things 2 to this fever pitch that seems almost excessive.

To keep the metaphor going, today should be the day that it all breaks. The nine episodes are now on Netflix, we can all watch them, and then it should be back to normal, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, well, no. Even throughout this weekend and beyond into next week, we here at Culturess will be breaking things down, analyzing and reviewing each episode, talking about what we want from the seemingly inevitable Stranger Things 3, talking about what Stranger Things 2 could have done better, breathlessly exclaiming over any and all great hair choices and generally being fans of a series that we genuinely like! Never let it be said we don’t appreciate irony around here.

But Stranger Things doesn’t have the grandiosity of, say, a Game of Thrones, and so, tonally, it just seems a little odd that it’s built up to similar heights as HBO’s titan of genre television. (Of course, we don’t think we’ve quite gotten to the level of sneaking pictures of Stranger Things sets like people do for Game of Thrones … yet. It’s early days in this show’s life. Give it time.)

Is it the fact that there’s now a Stranger Things aftershow that you can watch after you race through the entire second season, which seems to defeat the purpose of having an aftershow entirely? Perhaps it’s that Sesame Street is now hyping a Thanksgiving release of Sharing Things, its parody:

Or maybe it all started with the Super Bowl ad for this second season. It all feels like it’s too fast, too much, and, frankly, too soon. Let Stranger Things grow up a little before we treat it like the next coming of great television, even though we don’t want to say that it might not be.

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Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to prepare our snacks for a nine-hour Netflix session …