Netflix’s tremendously successful supernatural drama Stranger Things has been renewed for a third season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The second season of the show, consisting of nine episodes, was released on Netflix on October 27. A return date for the series has not yet been announced.
Set in the 1980s in a fictional town named Hawkins, Stranger Things chronicles the chain of events that follow after a scientific laboratory inadvertently opens a portal to an alternate dimension. The series revolves around a group of children who gradually begin to understand and grapple with the impact of the alternate dimension, named the Upside Down, on their lives. Stranger Things has been created by Matt and Ross Duffer.
The first season ended on a cliffhanger, with a child named Will being rescued from the Upside Down with the aid of Eleven’s telekinectic powers. However, the finale of the second season, does not offer too many clues about the direction that the third season is likely to take.
“Last year, we had a lot of little cliffhangers at the end of the season. We didn’t want to do that again,” Matt Duffer told The Hollywood Reporter. “We didn’t want to box ourselves in for season three. We wanted to be able to start season three on a very clean slate.”
The second season is set less than a year after the events of the first. The Duffer brothers had previously told The Hollywood Reporter that there would be a more substantial time jump between the second and third season.
The first season of Stranger Things, which was released in July 2016, was a sleeper hit, winning the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. It also received 18 Emmy nominations in 2016, winning five awards. According to Neilson data, Stranger Things 2 averaged 8.8 million US viewers per episode within the first three days of the show’s release.