Written by If you subscribe to Netflix, chances are the streaming platform has politely suggested you might want to watch their latest drama. It was, after all, executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer, the twins responsible for Stranger Things.
The show is called The Boroughs – and spoiler alert – it features a gang of boomers trying to solve the mystery of a monster who’s terrorising their gated community in a New Mexico desert. If we’re being lazy, imagine kids from Stranger Things are now of a pensionable age and they’re pooling their energy for one more adventure.
That said, it’s very watchable. And like The Duffer Brothers used the title track of Metallica’s 1986 iconic album Master of Puppets as a narrative hook in Stranger Things, the creators of the show – Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews – are doing it in a far more genteel way with a 1975 Bruce Springsteen song and potentially introducing Bruce Springsteen to a new generation.
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Early on The Boroughs, Thunder Road – the opening song from Springsteen’s third studio album – plays while the show’s main character Sam Cooper (played by Alfred Molina) watches his wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek) collapse after suffering a stroke. The traumatic event haunts him throughout the story and, after beginning to settle in his retirement community, decides to revisit the song during a pivotal moment in the show.
Throughout the episodes, his adult daughter Claire (Jena Malone) repeatedly and gently requests that he dig out his mother’s vinyl copy from storage, as she wants it as a keepsake.
Sure, everyone loves Bruce Springsteen, and there comes a moment in a person’s life when his kitchen sink dramas set to music speak to them. But why did the show pick this song in particular?
“Partly because it had never been done before and everyone thought we were crazy for trying,” show co-creator Will Matthews tells Decider “Thunder Road has never been used in any show or movie specifically. Bruce, in general, is very hard to get and so everyone thought that that was nuts. But also, everyone agreed it was the perfect song.”
It is, too, and it had to be, really.
Thunder Road opens the most important album of Springsteen’s career. The critical acclaim of his first two albums – 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and it’s The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, recorded and released the same year – was not reflected by sales other than on the East Coast.
If his third album flopped, Springsteen would be dropped by Columbia. His manager negotiated a bigger studio budget and although the sessions were “gruelling”, Springsteen and his band emerged with an album that reflected a country reeling from the Vietnam war, political scandal and a litany of disappointments.
“The songs were written immediately after the Vietnam War,” Springsteen told Brian Hiatt, author of Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs. “And you forget, everybody felt like that then. It didn’t matter how old you were, everybody experienced a radical change in the image they had of their country and of themselves. The reason was, ‘you were changed.’ You were going to be a radically different type of American than the generation that immediately preceded you, so that line was just recognising that fact.”
And four decades after writing the song on a piano, Springsteen’s own take on the song changed during his Springsteen on Broadway show.
“There’s nothing like that moment in your life of being young and leaving some place,” he said. “All that youthful freedom, you finally feel untethered from everything you’ve ever known: your past, your parents, the world you’ve gotten used to and you’ve loved and hated. Your life laying before you like a blank page.”
It makes perfect sense, then, that this song was hand-picked by The Boroughs creators from the millions written and recorded. Sure, it’s about the dreams of escaping a dead-end town, but It’s a song that will have a deep emotional resonance with people like Sam Cooper who are navigating the depths of grief while attempting to honour their ghosts by living life to the full.
The Boroughs is available to stream on Netflix.
