Netflix dropped all eight episodes of Stranger Things 3 on Thursday, which this year happened to be the Fourth of July, which happened to be a Thursday, which meant approximately nobody I know did anything productive on Friday. I'm writing this a day late on purpose. My brain is still mostly Hawkins, Indiana.
I'm not going to recap the plot, there are a thousand sites doing that right now and doing it faster than I can type. What I want to talk about is the Coke thing, because it's a much weirder story than "TV show is popular."
For anyone who somehow missed it: this season is set in the summer of 1985, and the writers built a whole subplot around New Coke, the reformulated Coca-Cola that the company rolled out in April 1985 and then quietly buried about ten weeks later after everyone hated it. It's one of the more famous corporate blunders of the 20th century. So of course Coca-Cola, being Coca-Cola, decided the correct response to a TV show mocking their worst product launch ever was to actually bring the stuff back. Limited run, retro can design, sold mostly through Amazon and a handful of stores, timed to land right before the premiere.
A friend of mine tracked some down a few weeks back and brought a six-pack over Thursday night, and I want to go on record: it is not good. It's not undrinkable either, which is somehow worse, because it means the whole 1985 controversy makes even less sense in hindsight. It tastes like regular Coke got left out in the sun for twenty minutes and someone added a spoonful of sugar to compensate. Sweeter, flatter, a little bit like cream soda if cream soda gave up halfway through being cream soda. My buddy Dave, who is not a soda person at all, described it as "fine, in the way a hotel continental breakfast is fine," which I think is the most accurate review anyone's going to write about it and I'm stealing it.
The marketing stunt worked on me though, and I resent that a little. I bought a can of nostalgia for a product that failed before I was old enough to drink soda unsupervised, because a Netflix show told me to, and I don't even feel bad about it, I just feel like I understand the mechanism a little too clearly now.
The bigger thing rattling around my head, and I've been chewing on this since the Chernobyl finale a month ago honestly, is what the all-at-once model does to a show like this. We used to have to wait a week between episodes and argue about it in comment sections and at lunch. Now the entire season exists in your account at 3:01am on release day and the discourse just detonates all at once and is basically over by Sunday. I watched all eight episodes across Thursday night and Friday, finished the finale around 2am, and by the time I woke up Friday afternoon half of Twitter had already moved on to arguing about the ending. There's no slow burn anymore, no week of theorizing. I miss the theorizing, honestly, even though I also stayed up until 2am because I couldn't stop, so clearly the binge model is working exactly as designed and my missing the old format doesn't change my own behavior one bit. That's the annoying part.
Also, unrelated to any of this, my neighbor two doors down was setting off fireworks in his driveway until close to midnight on the 4th and I am simply too old for that now. I used to think people who complained about fireworks noise were being dramatic. I have become that person. It happens fast.
Anyway. If you're going to buy the New Coke, don't pay reseller prices for it, some people were asking fifteen or twenty bucks for a six-pack on eBay within days of the show dropping, and it is genuinely just fine soda in a nostalgic can. Save your money, watch the show, skip the marketing tie-in unless a friend brings it over for free like mine did. That part I'd recommend without reservation.