Netflix renewed “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85” for a second season on Tuesday, just five days after the animated spinoff premiered on April 23. New episodes are slated to drop this fall, an unusually quick turnaround for animation that all but confirms the two seasons were produced back-to-back.
Showrunner Eric Robles, the “Glitch Techs” and “Fanboy & Chum Chum” veteran running the show through Australia’s Flying Bark Productions, gave the first real tease of where the story heads next. “The Hawkins Investigators Club is back, and a new paranormal threat has emerged from the town’s abandoned silver mines,” Robles said in a statement. “I can’t wait for fans to discover where this entity and the mysterious blue flower we last saw blooming in the Upside Down at the end of Season 1 take our young heroes.”
That blue flower matters. In the season 1 finale, after Eleven kills the season’s big bad, half of its body slips back through to the Upside Down and a strange blue bloom starts spreading from the corpse at speed. Robles told ComicBook.com before the renewal that the color “really says a lot,” calling the bloom “an amalgamation now of something new” born from Upside Down science crashing into Upside Down matter.
The numbers explain Netflix’s hurry. “Tales From ’85” debuted at No. 7 on the streamer’s weekly English-language TV chart for April 20-26, drawing 13.8 million hours viewed, or roughly 2.8 million completed views. Netflix is also flagging it as one of the top 15 animated series debuts in the platform’s history. Critically the response was thinner. The show sits at 63% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 54% audience score, with reviewers split on whether the spinoff is a fond Saturday-morning throwback or busy fan service.
Set during the winter of 1985, the show wedges itself between the second and third seasons of the live-action series. The voice cast is largely a fresh bench: Brooklyn Davey Norstedt as Eleven, Luca Diaz as Mike, Benjamin Plessala as Will, Braxton Quinney as Dustin, Elisha “EJ” Williams as Lucas, and Jolie Hoang-Rappaport as Max. Odessa A’zion voices Nikki Baxter, the new kid in Hawkins, with Janeane Garofalo and Lou Diamond Phillips playing her parents. Jeremy Jordan handles Steve Harrington and Robert Englund, the original Freddy Krueger, voices a character named Cosmo.
Behind the scenes the producing team carries over from the flagship. Matt and Ross Duffer executive produce through Upside Down Pictures with Hilary Leavitt. Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen are on board through 21 Laps. Robles is the showrunner.
Robles has said in earlier interviews he sees room for as many as five seasons inside the small window between “Stranger Things” seasons 2 and 3, with each chapter notionally covering a different month. “We are frozen in time between these two seasons, two and three,” he told ComicBook.com. “But within this frozen time, we’re now going to expand this mini-universe.”
The renewal arrives in a busy stretch for the franchise. The flagship series wrapped on December 31, 2025, after five seasons and 1.5 billion cumulative views. “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the Tony-nominated stage prequel, is running in London’s West End and recently extended its Broadway sit with a new cast. A McDonald’s Happy Meal tie-in for “Tales From ’85” rolls out this week. Netflix has not set a specific premiere date for season 2 beyond the fall window.
