Senior Tripping: ‘THE BOROUGHS’ is COCOON with claws…

Sam Cooper is adrift. After the sudden loss of his wife and realising the strain of living on the couch of his daughter’s family home, the life-long engineer finds himself facing a future at The Boroughs retirement home. He has no interest in spending the rest of his life in the enclave, an idea that was only attractive when both he and his wife would share it.

But the Boroughs’ contract is hard to get out of immediately and Sam is encouraged to test the waters (or the sand) and to try it out. His expectations are not easily changed, but when potential neighbour, Jack, persistently invites him to meet some of the other eclectic ‘inmates’, he tries his best.

However, stranger things than old age appear to be afoot. Something appears to be coming in the night to feed on residents, Sam keeps having visions of his dead wife and deep in the New Mexico desert, murmurations fall from the sky and a tree bears interesting fruit.

The Boroughs holds a very dark and very old secret, but will Sam and his neighbours be able to work out the real threat and cost before it’s too late?

*some spoilers*

Why should the kids have all the damn fun?

Though ‘The Duffer Brothers’ ™ first venture after Stranger Things led them to attaching their names as executive producers to  Something Very Bad is Going to Happen,  any similarities to their breakout cult hit were more marketing-driven and tenuous at best. But now along comes The Boroughs (also executive-produced by the Duffers) and proving that this latest venture is the true heir and a book-ender with its own signature twist.

Perhaps best described as Cocoon with Claws or The Twilight Years Zone, The Boroughs – and its view of what makes life worth living – is the senior and just as subversive counter-balance to Stranger Things, here taking on the glories and regrets of lost youth and facing monsters both real and thematic. But if that’s all it was, one could argue a sense of simple coasting or opportune cloning and that would do The Boroughs a major disservice. So, thankfully, while this new eight-part series fits comfortably into the same genre and similar template – having a group of disparate characters bantering and facing down something potentially otherworldly – it is a different enough and more personal – and occasionally visceral – take on the idea of nostalgia and populated by veteran actors who fully invest in proceedings and bring their own distinctive vibe.

That all-star cast is universally excellent.

Alfred Molina anchors it all as Sam Cooper, an engineer and inventor who suddenly lost his beloved wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek) several months previously and is now reluctantly moving to the retirement village of the series title so as not to be a burden to his daughter and her family. He’s still plagued by memories of Lilly and the day of her demise and though he resents the move to The Boroughs (something he and his wife had talked of doing together, but never apart) he understands that grief has taken its toll on him. Molina plays all the emotional beats well – loneliness, anger, love and gradually kinship with some of his fellow townsfolk, especially when they start to discover troubling secrets together.

Among those quirky neighbours are Geena Davis as the rebellious Renee Joyce (a lovely mischievous older female role and character that Davis fully embraces), Denis O’Hare as Wally Baker (a retired doctor who is slowly dying of cancer but is determined to not go quietly), Bill Pullman as Jack Willard (a ladies’ man determined to be Sam’s first and best friend in the cul-de-sac) and Alfre Woodard and Clarke Peters as Judy and Art Daniels (too aging but free-spirited, open-marriage hippies who are quietly struggling in keeping their romance going as their priorities change). The series has some of its best moments in the few times it allows the incredible ensemble to gather together, simply shooting the breeze and assessing their lives, but otherwise it splits them up and pairs them off to face individual elements of their collective challenge.

There’s also sympathetic security-guard Paz Navarro (Carlos Miranda) who takes a shine to Renee’s charms and Jena Malone as Sam’s daughter Claire, struggling with whether her father might be struggling with reality. We also have to have villains and no-one in their right minds would trust the all-too-slick Boroughs’ owners Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich) and wife Anneliese (The Sinner‘s Alice Kremelberg in glamourous form). They are clearly nefarious, but it’s finding out what their goals are that makes the story interesting.