Parents' Guide to Stranger Things: Season 1

Parents need to know that Stranger Things is a sci-fi horror series about a group of kids who contend with supernatural forces and secret government experiments after the disappearance of a middle schooler in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983. The show's overall tone is exciting and adventurous, with heroic and intrepid characters who team up to solve a mystery, but the level of violence, language, and sexuality makes this one iffy for tweens and under. The show's central mystery involves the disappearance of a young child, who's presumed dead; we see a body being pulled from a lake and then lying on a slab. Characters including teens and tweens are in frequent mortal danger from a giant inhuman twisted monster; we see the monster in brief scenes, and many scenes of a spooky dimension that looks like a dark version of the show's reality. Characters are also killed on-screen, and we see blood, gore, and dead bodies. Teens undress down to underwear and kiss in bed; later, they talk about having had sex. Teens also drink and smoke cigarettes; one adult character has a drinking problem, and several smoke. Expect cursing ("s--t," "a--hole," "hell," "damn," "bulls--t," and "son of a bitch"), insults that target race and disability ("midnight," "toothless"), and iffy language related to gender and sexuality: "p---y," "queer," "f-g," "fairy."