[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Boroughs Season 1]

Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with the creators of Netflix’s The Boroughs, Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.

The duo discuss their collaboration with executive producers the Duffer Brothers, the potential for more seasons, and Episode 8’s Stranger Things Easter egg.

They also break down the mythology and final moments, the Mother’s blood logic, and tease what’s to come.

Netflix’s latest bingeable series from Upside Down Pictures is the eight-episode fantasy sci-fi The Boroughs, from creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance). With Season 1 available to stream now, Collider had the chance to sit down with the duo to dig into the details and ask our biggest lingering questions after the series finale. At The Boroughs, a small retirement community in the New Mexico desert, life is idyllic for its aging residents. From the outside looking in, it’s the perfect spot to kick back and enjoy the golden years. But take a closer look, like Alfred Molina’s Sam Cooper unwittingly does, and you discover not only is The Boroughs not the paradise it broadcasts, but something much more sinister is at play beneath its picturesque guise. In addition to bringing back characters as charming and elements as fantastical as Stranger Things, The Boroughs also stars a seriously stacked cast, including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Jena Malone, Clarke Peters, and Denis O’Hare. Talking with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Addiss and Matthews get “real nerdy” with us about everything from the mysterious origins of Blaine (Seth Numrich) and Anneliesse Shaw (Alice Kremelberg), the technicalities of Mother and her children’s blood, and how they function together, and the show’s exploration of “transmission” and time. They discuss the potential for more seasons, how their executive producers, the Duffer Brothers, helped shape Season 1 and keep that Episode 8 Stranger Things Easter egg, and their “reset” theory. You can check out the full conversation in the video above or the transcript below.
How the Duffer Brothers Helped Shape ‘The Boroughs’

And yes, that final glitch scene was a direct nod to Stranger Things.

Image via Netflix

COLLIDER: When you guys went in to pitch this thing, how much did you pitch a three-year plan or a five-year plan, and how much was it, “This is our show, and we’ll see what happens?” JEFFREY ADDISS: We pitched out pretty strongly the first season in terms of all the benchmarks. I would say probably we only said a few lines about what would happen after that, because part of it is, the truth is, you learn as you go. But we actually know the last shot of the last scene of the last episode of this show already. We know how this ends. WILL MATTHEWS: Because we know what it’s about, what emotionally the point is. So, what are the set pieces? What are the individual beats along the way? But if this is where the show opens, here’s where the show closes, because here’s what the show is about. So, we did know that. So the Duffer Brothers are producers of this. Did they give any specific advice or notes that were incorporated into the show? ADDISS: Oh, yeah. The first one that I can remember right at the beginning was that we were going to make it in a smaller retirement home or some much smaller community, and they encouraged us to open it up into something much bigger because they were like, “You might just run out of story here. You just need a bigger canvas for the amount of episodes of stories, of seasons that you’re going to make.” So, that was one right off the bat. MATTHEWS: Yeah. They had a really good note about the ending. When we first talked about how to end Season 1 to set up Season 2, in hopes, they said, “You never know what’s going to happen, so tell a full story and then crack a door, but don’t marry yourself to anything in the future because you don’t know what the future brings.” And that was why. Episode 8 ends, and you have Sam Cooper in the bathroom, and he glitches in the mirror. What do you want to tell people about that shot and what that glitch means? ADDISS: It’s definitely a nod to where we want to go. It’s definitely well thought through. It’s not done for no reason. It is a very specific reason. We wanted to pay a little bit of homage to Stranger Things, is the truth. Because if you remember, the first season ends with Will in the mirror. So when Matt and Ross [Duffer] read that, they laughed. They knew what we were doing, and they were like… MATTHEWS: “That’s fair.” ADDISS: We were like, “Come on! We had to.” And we got away with it, which is crazy. It’s just how generous they are that they let us eat that.

Related

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Every Drop of Blood Contains “Infinite Possibility,” Say Creators

They break down the relationship of Mother to her children.

Image via Netflix

The other thing is that the very last shot of Episode 8 is almost like the screen is collapsing into a black hole or something. I don’t know how to describe it. What do you want to say about that shot, and specifically why it’s included, and what the meaning is of that shot? ADDISS: The Boroughs is about a community, and there’s this idea that there’s other stuff out there, and it’s a bigger world. We really looked at that closing as an old TV turning off. The idea of transmission is a big idea in the show. Why does the mother’s blood cause healing and for people to stay young, but the children’s blood does not? ADDISS: We think of it like bees. We thought about this a lot. So, when a bee collects the pollen, it has to bring it back to the hive to make the honey. The blood is the honey, the creature is the delivery system for it. So it’s only once it gets processed by Mother, because it’s Mother’s blood that does it, not the creature. MATTHEWS: So you’ve got drones and the queen. Sure. So, Mother decides to basically blow up and take her kids with her. Do you want to explain why she took the kids with her? What was going through your mind with that? ADDISS: If you think about the idea of queens and drones, they might be more one thing than multiple different things. There might not be a situation where one lives without the other. And so, in that way, if you look at it, she’s surrounded by herself. MATTHEWS: And because she has a different relationship with time, she has a different relationship with death. So it’s not exactly the same as if a human were to do that scene. It’s a little bit more fluid for them.

Image via Netflix

So one of the things about the children’s blood, when they do that experiment, the blue in the TV room, and it all of a sudden becomes a starfield, what do you want to say about the children’s blood and what causes that, and maybe what the starfield means? ADDISS: We’ll talk about it. [Laughs] I’m going full nerdy. ADISS: You’re going for it. That takes place in front of the TV, later they use the TVs to do it. It’s the idea of transmission. It’s the idea of the old TVs interfering with something in the blood. And really, when you talk about the explosion that comes after, there are a lot of shots of the idea of of universe, of space, of time, and so we wanted it to feel slightly cosmic, maybe. MATTHEWS: So the central question is, what will you do with the time you have left? The idea of “left.” How much time? How can you possibly know? We liked the idea that in that tiny little drop of blood, there contains an infinite possibility. It’s full of promise, and that’s what every moment of time is. ADDISS: We wanted it to look like the universe.
‘The Boroughs’ Creators Address the Biggest Unanswered Season 1 Questions

Here’s what we learned.

Image via Netflix

If Clarke Peters’ character had eaten the peach pit, what would have happened? And what would have happened if he had planted the peach pit in his garden? ADDISS: We’re not going to answer that one. You’re asking some very good questions, and we know the answers. But what’s important to us thematically in that was the idea that he stopped eating the peach at the pit because you don’t eat the pit, and Anneliese, so desperate for more of her time, wouldn’t eat the pit. Who would do that? It’s just a question of, like, what is your relationship to time? Sure. This is real nerdy. Why does no one realize that the couple has been running the Boroughs for 75 years, because they essentially look the same? I was looking to see if there were any photos around, but there aren’t really any photos. I understand most of the key people have been working for them, and it’s an old person’s home, so people forget, but still, there are newspaper clippings. This is real nerdy. ADDISS: So it’s a combination of things. We very specifically tried to say, “This is in the desert and almost in a bubble,” so that it feels like there aren’t a lot of things that happen outside of it. Does that make sense? Totally.

ADDISS: And yes, you are right that it is a generational company. If we’re getting really nerdy, and maybe this will come up later if we get more seasons, maybe they’ve stepped away at a few points, and they come back. So maybe a reset happens. We imagine this idea of reset. How long would it take to clear out the population? MATTHEWS: We had a speech for Hank that we ended up not shooting, where he talks about how technology has made living forever worse, and that there was a time when he could travel the world, and now he can’t because you can get caught. He talks about cell phones and cameras and surveillance, and how there’s less freedom, even though he has all this freedom. ADDISS: So we hope we get to explore that down the road, because it’s an interesting idea. Signing on to be immortal in 1950 is very different than signing on to be immortal in 2025.

Totally. The people who run the Boroughs, do they have kids or any relatives that perhaps were not shown in Season 1? Because now that they’re no longer there, maybe there are family members. ADDISS: Right. MATTHEWS: Well, I’m sure I don’t know. ADDISS: I don’t know. We have worked out this sort of idea. We really think of them as a love story, like they are a love story, and we hope we get to explore that love story more. But we don’t know. Hopefully, people watch. The crow that Clarke Peters’ character has in that barn thing is named Brooksie, and I’m just curious if that’s a nod to Shawshank Redemption. ADDISS: 100%. Shout out to Jose Molina, one of our writers who worked on Firefly and a bunch of other stuff, who wrote that episode, named that crow, named after Shawshank. MATTHEWS: The guy who played Brooksie, I saw do a play at Williamstown, and that was the moment I knew I wanted to go into entertainment, was that actor. The Boroughs Season 1 is available to stream on Netflix.

Release Date

May 21, 2026

Network

Netflix

Showrunner

Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews

Directors

Augustine Frizzell, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Ben Taylor