Stranger Things Heads to 1955 Nevada: Netflix Orders Prequel "Other Worlds"

Netflix made it official on Stranger Things Day. The streamer has ordered Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a live-action prequel that leaves Hawkins, Indiana behind entirely — new town, new decade, new cast — and points the franchise at the Nevada desert. The announcement landed November 6, the date this franchise marks every year: in the show's world, it is the day Will Byers disappeared in 1983.

The series is set in Marion, Nevada, in 1955, and it digs into the earliest chapter of the mythology the flagship series built — the events around Henry Creel, the boy who becomes Vecna. Matt and Ross Duffer have teased that the story covers what happened before Henry's exposure to the otherworldly substance that gave him his powers. Matt Duffer has said it will explain the mysterious rock the young Henry finds in a scientist's briefcase in the Nevada caves.

A prequel to the prequel

Stranger Things has already gone back once. The stage play The First Shadow is set in 1959 and follows a teenage Henry Creel. Other Worlds predates the play, too — 1955, four years earlier — making it the earliest chapter of this story on any screen or stage. It is the franchise's third expansion, after the play and an animated series, and by far its most substantial live-action continuation: a full series order, sold on a single line of geography — before Hawkins, there was Marion, Nevada.

For once, the mythology's home address is here. Hawkins was the door the audience walked through, but the Creel story — the wound the whole saga keeps circling — starts in Nevada, in a desert town in the middle of the 1950s. The flagship series treated that past as fragments and flashbacks, pieces of a file the characters kept prying open. Other Worlds moves in and lives there.

Who's building it

The series is co-created by the Duffer brothers with Kate Trefry, a writer on the mothership who wrote The First Shadow; Trefry serves as showrunner and executive producer. In the announcement, carried by EW, the Duffers called her a writer "who has been in the trenches with us since season 2." Joe Wright — the BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning director of Atonement and Darkest Hour — directs the first three episodes and executive produces, alongside Shawn Levy of 21 Laps. Production is set for New Mexico.

The cast is all new, and none of it has been announced. The series premieres in 2028, with filming still ahead of it. What exists today is the map: a date, a desert town, and the promise that the strangest story in the franchise started a long way from Hawkins.

The bet here isn't really the setting — it's the hand-off. The Duffers built this mythology, but the person running its origin story is the writer who already carried Henry Creel once, on stage, and made it work. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried in Marion, it's Kate Trefry.