Because it’s been 546 years since Stranger Things premiered (and about that long since its last season aired), it can require some brain power to recall just how massive this dang show was (and, sure, is). The idea of a Netflix show taking the entire world by storm feels a little quaint in 2025, even if that’s only because in between Stranger Things’ first and soon-to-be-released final seasons, Netflix itself has taken the entire world by storm. But before you get all “Let’s get you to bed, Grandpa,” allow me to reminisce on just how wildly popular the first season of Stranger Things was, how fully it filled up all four of those highly coveted quadrants.
The Ringer launched in March 2016, a serendipitous four months before the Duffer brothers gave us Stranger Things. A collision of cultural institutions. Trying to carve out space in a crowded media landscape, this very good website and its staff of very smart and adult-aged writers and editors made aggressive moves to own the Upside Down–addled zeitgeist. By that, I mostly mean that we blogged about Barb a lot.
We blogged about Barb so much, dude.
I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded who Barb is—for some reason, I suspect she’s the one thing everyone remembers with crystal clarity, more than Vecna, more than David Harbour in a Russian work camp, more than the guy from Rudy getting ripped to shreds by extraterrestrial dogs. But just in case: Barb was Nancy Wheeler’s best friend in Season 1 who (a) could not shotgun beers and (b) was unceremoniously killed by the Upside Down monster and then subsequently forgotten by every character on the show (until Season 2, when wrongs could be righted). Shanked by her own show, Barb became a rallying cry for the internet: #JusticeForBarb and #ImWithBarb became popular Twitter hashtags; Etsy was flooded with Barb paraphernalia; the actress who played Barb, Shannon Purser, was nominated for an Emmy. And for The Ringer, she became a genuine fascination. An obsession, you might even say.
“Everyone Needs a Friend Like Barb,” by Allison P. Davis
Elite blogging here. Immediately makes you wish we were all frozen in the amber of July 2016—for this blog alone and no other geopolitical reasons. It contains subheads such as “Barb’s Name Is Barb” and, published a mere week after Stranger Things hit Netflix, is proof of just how quickly Barb Mania swept the country.
Also, FYI, Allison would go on to coin the phrase “big dick energy.” One wonders whether that would’ve ever happened without Barb.
“Why Did Some at The Ringer Turn on Barb From ‘Stranger Things’?” by Chris Ryan
In this piece by a pre-“CR” Chris Ryan, a tonal shift in the Barb discourse can be felt. The sweetness of the Davis blog is nowhere to be found—the people, or at least some of them, have turned on Barb, or at least the idea that we should all be obsessed with Barb. The backlash has set in.
In his best newsboy cap, Chris investigated this phenomenon by examining the microcosmic rot within The Ringer. To this day, the quotes are illuminating. “The only thing upside down about Stranger Things is the obscene obsession that human shrug emoji Barb has spawned,” Mallory Rubin, now head of editorial, is quoted as saying. “Barb love has seeped through our walls and exploded through our speakers, and it’s high time we lock it in a bear trap, beat it with a baseball bat, and light it on fire.”
“A Stat to Explain Barb, the Internet, and Television,” by Jason Concepcion
“It started as a simple, yet vitally important, question: How much more content can we, the writers of the internet, squeeze out of Barb from Stranger Things?”
In all seriousness, though, this is a remarkably smart blog in which Concepcion created a formula—Content Units Per Scene—to explain a given character’s efficiency for creating content. Barb had the highest CUPS score, obviously. Other notable high-CUPS performers include the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, Don Draper, and John Turturro’s eczema-riddled feet in The Night Of. (Long live 2016.)
“Even the Police Chief From ‘Stranger Things’ Couldn’t Find Zach Britton,” by Michael Baumann
Why, yes, that is a picture of Barb from Stranger Things in a Baltimore Orioles hat.
Here we have the absolute endpoint of Barb Blogging. The form has been warped to oblivion, the context laid to waste, the subject removed from its natural habitat and transported to the totally different world of baseball for the mere object of dunking on a manager who didn’t put in his best relief pitcher in a win-or-go-home wild-card game. (Besides the point, but: Remember Ubaldo Jimenez?) This might not even be blogging. It’s art. And it really works, in large part because even by October of 2016, the idea of Barb was strong enough to stand as a baseball-themed creative writing prompt.
OK, it’s only four blogs. It’s not that many. We could’ve done more. But I think my points still stand. And to recap, those points are, in order of importance:
1. The Ringer—really good website!
2. Stranger Things is a level of popular that almost no other show has reached, so huge that an up-and-coming media company could stake its entire future on one of its characters who died three episodes into the run, having uttered, like, 10 lines at most. If you find yourself wondering why a show is allowed to have an interminably long break between its fourth and final seasons or why the Thanksgiving conversation is centered entirely on Eleven—you must only remember Barb.
