REVIEW: Netflix’s ‘The Boroughs’ Is Just Great Sci-Fi

Some of Hollywood’s best dramatic and most well-known character actors are older now, and while some lean into playing younger, there is something exciting about seeing them embrace their age through the roles they choose. Netflix’s The Boroughs is a fantastic example of this, delivering the fun that genre storytelling can provide without overshadowing the younger actors in the ensemble and making a unique take on television sci-fi storytelling. 

Created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, The Boroughs takes a look at a revolutionary retirement community that functions as a fully realized town. The titular community was created by the Shaw family and is now run by Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich) and his wife, Anneliese.

Over the course of eight episodes, audiences follow the residents of the titular retirement community as they struggle with a mysterious creature after the death of their friend Jack. With a stacked cast, we follow Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina), Judy Daniels (Alfre Woodard) and her husband Art Daniels (Clarke Peters), Wally Baker (Denis O’Hare), and Renee Joyce (Geena Davis) as residents in the same cul-de-sac in the titular senior community.

This community was originally created to be a self-contained town, to give seniors relaxation and help, without their agency being taken away. We enter the community with Sam, as his family drops him off at the house in The Boroughs that he picked out with his wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek), who passed away.

Fulfilling Lilly’s wish, Sam is entering the retirement community for the autonomy it offers, even if he’s more than frustrated by the prying eyes of his handler and the AI system in everyone’s homes. Filled with grief and growing discomfort with his new life, Sam is having a tough time coming to terms with being who he has been for his whole life. But when he discovers the friendly neighbor with a creature on his face, dead, well, that mystery sparks a new life in him.

The ensemble cast of The Boroughs is stacked, from its core cast to its supporting players.

Finding the dead body of one of your neighbors is an easy way to convince you not to seclude yourself. Serving as the inflection point for the series, stumbling into that moment starts to bring him closer together with his other cul-de-sac neighbors. 

The first person in Sam’s fold is Wally, The Borough’s mortician. A former research scientist, he’s the perfect partner for Sam, a former engineer. Wally is curious, excited about life, and even excited about discovering the creature. But unfortunately, while all of the seniors we meet all have mortality in front of them, it means something else for Wally, whose cancer has stopped responding to treatments. 

Judy is the community’s resident “Nancy Drew.” A former investigative journalist, trying to uncover the truth used to be her career, and now it’s something she does anytime a new neighbor moves in. But the call of her profession is only one part of what drives her to solve the mystery.

The other reason is that she is tired of being seen as an old woman, and, well, Jack, the murdered neighbor, was her lover. While the marriage is open, the one thing she could not do was fall in love, but she did. 

But as much as The Boroughs showcases her love for Jack, the more important thing is that she loved how Jack made her feel. He made her feel young; he saw her as a journalist, as a woman, as someone more than a senior routine. For his part, husband Art is the exact opposite of her.

Art is content just going with the flow, doing yoga in the front yard to Santana, smoking weed, and just being calm. In his old age, it’s all about peace and relaxation, but Judy needs something more, and maybe Art does too. Which he discovers when he accidentally stumbles into the secret that the rest of the cul-de-sac is trying to solve.

Finally, Geena Davis’ Renee rounds out the cast. She’s the voice of the community, and as a former music executive, she’s used to making deals and not taking no for an answer. Unlike our other characters, Renee is only in The Boroughs because her career blew up, and she needed to move in with her mother. She advocates for her mom and the others she sees, and that fire is something that helps ignite her fling with the security guard of the community, Paz Navarro (Carlos Miranda). 

The Boroughs lets Geena Davis show that a woman’s life doesn’t end at 40; romance, joy, and ferocity are still there.

The two hit it off, and as they get to know each other (and sleep with each other), it’s clear how much Paz is in love with Renee. But, Paz isn’t the first younger man that she’s dated, and because of that, her walls are as high as they can be.

The way that The Boroughs handles their romance is one with care, and one that doesn’t invest too much in distinguishing their ages. When they meet, there is chemistry, they hook up, and they still look out for each other. It’s just like any other steamy romance you’d see with other couples. 

There are so few films or television series that don’t act like women are sexless hags, only there to offer advice. And even though the needle has been moved to include a larger variety of women in Hollywood, seeing older women as women with needs, intimate and otherwise, is still not common practice. The Boroughs, though, is not trying to tell a story only about age, but rather that the youth retained is real, even as wrinkles set in. 

For his part, though, Sam doesn’t necessarily fit into the community, or at least he doesn’t think he does. When he first meets the rest of the ensemble cast, all of them are accustomed to their life in relaxation. They love The Boroughs and have accepted that their careers are over; now it’s time to just live for themselves in peace.

And the reality is that Sam thought he was okay with all of that, but the contentious nature of being put into a “home” by his family after his wife’s death prompts him to hold onto his autonomy just a little more. He corrects everyone when they use the present tense for his career as an engineer or when they ask about his wife.

Sam is very aware of his life now, but when he finds Jack’s body and sees the creature, something awakens in him, and he wakes something up in the rest of the community. Tragedy brings them together, mystery binds them, and throughout the series, the showrunners never forget to build intricate dynamics between the characters.

Sci-fi is more than just the creatures and technology; it’s also about what it has to say about us. 

The Boroughs is an honest series, yes, even through its genre storytelling. As much as it answers what the creature is, where it came from, and why it’s targeting their community, the series is also about all the characters finding out who they still are and finding life again. The series is as much about the joy you can still find later in life when other beleive you should settle down. 

From the jump, audiences know what is happening with the monster that Sam finds in episode one. Youth and life at all costs drive this series’ narrative. The monsters feed on the seniors and, in turn, create a kind of fountain of youth. And no one is the wiser, because at this point in life, the next big life event for the characters is death. 

The series’ primary conflict after the minor reveal centers on the fact that the seniors in The Boroughs have been brought together like cattle. But where the community allows many of the seniors in this self-running town to live their lives without restriction, other seniors, those who need consistent care, live in The Manor, a senior care building that is made to try and mimic the outside world. If you have dementia, or in our characters’ case, find out about the monsters, The Manor is your new home.

Vanity, greed, and the refusal to accept death keep The Boroughs’ antagonists in place. They’re people who could not accept the end of life, and more importantly, longed for the life they had in their youth, to the point that they’re okay with harvesting people to get it. More importantly, though, even the creatures they’re using to harvest the youth of others are mere tools in their quest. 

The tension in The Boroughs is all about acceptance. Whether it’s grief for loved ones or anxiety pushing you to fear death with all of your being. And, also, whether or not you accept your new lot in life. While age, death, and youth have been consistent sci-fi themes, the particular lens we see in The Boroughs feels not only original but also pertinent today. 

Sci-fi is at its best when it uses science to tell sus something about ourselves and our anxieties. That said, the fact that so many actors who have been consistent in Hollywood are leaning into their age adds another level to the story, which, whether intentional or not, pays off. 

The Boroughs is Netflix’s latest sci-fi series, and it’s one of its best. 

In addition to the story, The Boroughs hit a perfect stride between horror and sci-fi, as Sam begins to see his dead wife everywhere. Manifesting as a visual glitch, like the old televisions he loves tinkering with. Much of the immersive effect that drives tension comes from how well the practical and CG effects work without ever being jarring against the actors in a scene. 

Whether it’s make-up, prosthetics, or a green screen, The Boroughs is one of the better series on Netflix when it comes to effects work, and it goes a long way. Like everything else that makes the series sing, it’s the believability of the effects work that drives home the point that sci-fi doesn’t always need to be a massive set piece to be effective. Because of that, it helps the emotions resonate, since almost every interaction with the creatures pulls out a specific response from the characters at play. 

Ultimately, too, even with as much detail as I’ve gone into so far, there are layers that I haven’t even touched. With excellently executed twists, thoughtful character relationships, and a cast that never rests on its laurels, The Boroughs is one of the best series that Netflix has put out this year. It’s about where we’re all going, and even with its weird little creatures, that heart is never lost. 

The Boroughs is out of this world, but it’s also so tightly focused on grief and getting older that its success lies in capturing the universality of those themes. While shows like Stranger Things focus on a nostalgic childhood that not everyone had, The Boroughs is easy to buy into because we will all get old, we will all die, and we will all have to adapt to a new life when the one we’ve worked so hard for slips away. 

The Boroughs is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.