In The Boroughs the sentence comes with an almost annoying simplicity:
You don’t come here to die. Come here to live.
It seems like one of those glossy brochure jokes, good for selling villas, fake palm trees and sunsets that are always the same. But then it stays with you, because within that sentence there is the whole trap of the series: a place built to seem serene, inhabited by people who the outside world has already begun to look at with half-dismissal in their eyes.
The new Netflix series produced by the Duffer brothers, created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, is set in a retirement community in the New Mexico desert: a residential neighborhood for self-sufficient retirees, very American, very tidy, very far from our idea of RSA. Low houses, full sun, common spaces, neighbors, organized activities, that promise of clean and manageable old age that always has a certain effect.
Of course, coming from Italy, this idea of the “community for the elderly” almost makes you smile: here at 65 years of age many are still working, helping their children, keeping very elderly parents, grandchildren, medical visits and bureaucracy together. Far from golden years: they are often years with a full agenda and a back that presents the bill. But the cultural reflection remains similar. Once you pass a certain age, the narrative begins to move from the center to the frame.
Sam Cooper, played by Alfred Molina, arrives there after his wife’s death. He enters a place that should help him start over, but instead at first it just seems like a gilded cage. Netflix describes it exactly like this: for him The Boroughs it’s a place to figure out what to do with the time left. Moving around him are other residents played by Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare: a gang of people who, in any lazier tale, would have become side dishes. The eccentric neighbor. The brilliant lady. The grumpy pensioner. The friend with too many memories. Here, however, they become the central body of the story.
Come here to live
The supernatural arrives, of course. Here comes the mystery, comes the threat, comes that air from Stranger Things raised and retired under the New Mexico sun, after all the executive producers are the same. The official premise is about a seemingly perfect community where a grieving newcomer encounters something monstrous and joins a band of unlikely heroes to uncover a dark secret. Their “golden years” become more dangerous, and they far more formidable, than anyone expects.
The series, however, manages to captivate you already in the way it forces the viewer to stand in front of elderly bodies without treating them as a tender, fragile or comical backdrop. Bodies that narration usually uses to soften or close the conversation. The Boroughs makes a smarter choice: puts those people at the center of the action and lets them move the story.
That phrase, “You don’t come here to die. You come here to live”, works precisely because it touches on an enormous fear without explaining it too much. The fear that old age will be mistaken for an antechamber. The fear that a retirement community is seen as a place where one waits, with more comfort, for the end of the race. The even more subtle fear of being alive, very lucid, present, and still being treated like people already outside the scene.
In this sense The Boroughs uses the fantastic to talk about a very concrete thing: the need to still count within a network of people. Sam enters the community as a grieving man, isolated in his loss. Then the group forces him, almost against his will, to re-enter the lives of others.
The community without a postcard
The risk, when talking about elderly people living together, is to immediately slip into an uplifting postcard. The common room, the bingo, the painting course. All very reassuring, all very easy to sell. The series, fortunately, also keeps the most uncomfortable side inside: a community can seem perfect and still leave someone on the margins. You can live in a place full of people and only feel the same. You may have a calendar of activities and no one to talk to.
Living together does not automatically equate to feeling connected. An elderly person can be very well alone, choose their own home, defend their own rhythms, their own cooking, their own silence. Another may live next to dozens of neighbors and feel transparent. The difference lies in the quality of bonds, in the freedom to choose, in respect for privacy, in the possibility of giving something to others as well as receiving assistance.
The Boroughs it works when it shows the elderly as people still full of narrative function. They move within a story that asks them to act, not just to be protected. Outside the series, this thing has a less cinematic and much more concrete name: social connection. Not the generic one, to “keep in company”. A connection made of recognizable presence, habits, neighbourhood, phone calls, shared activities, small daily gestures that seem like checks but are instead care: someone who notices if you haven’t gone out. Someone who notices a different voice. Someone who waits for you for coffee without turning you into a patient.
When loneliness becomes health
In this regard, science has long since stopped treating loneliness as a sentimental matter. The World Health Organization considers quality social connections essential for mental health, physical health and overall well-being. The most recent estimates indicate that loneliness affects approximately 16% of the world’s population and approximately 11.8% of elderly people.
In a fact sheet updated in 2025, the WHO includes loneliness and social isolation among the main risk factors for mental health in later life. Approximately 14% of adults aged 70 and over live with a mental disorder, with depression and anxiety among the most common conditions. The WHO itself also highlights the value of meaningful social activities: they can improve positive mental health, life satisfaction and quality of life, reducing depressive symptoms.
The distinction, however, matters. Social isolation concerns the objective scarcity of relationships, contacts, networks and participation. Loneliness is the subjective experience of feeling alone. The two things may overlap, or not. In Italy the topic has enormous consistency. According to the 2026 Istat annual report, in the two-year period 2024-2025 one fifth of the adult population lives alone: 19.9% of people aged 18 and over, equal to 9.9 million individuals. After the age of 65, the share rises: a third of the elderly population lives alone, 32.1%, equal to 4.6 million people. They are mostly women: 69.2% of lonely elderly people are female and, after the age of 74, almost one in two women lives alone.
Istat, however, also places an important caution: living alone it doesn’t automatically mean being isolated. As age advances, however, not having relatives living together can become an element of vulnerability and makes external support from relatives, friends or neighbors more important. In 2025, 83.7% of single people declare that they have at least one non-cohabiting person on whom they can count in case of need; among the over 75s only the network narrows and neighbors become central: 64.3% say they can count on them.
They are numbers that seem cold until we put them back into an ordinary day. The shopping to bring up. The drug to remember. The visit to book. The television turned on only to hear a voice. The neighbor who once knocked and has now moved away. The son who calls, yes, but between one meeting and another. The city that works very well for those who run and much worse for those who slow down.
Cohousing, neighbors and borders
Within this scenario, models such as senior cohousing, supportive condominiums, light residential communities, day centers, walking groups and neighborhood networks should not be described as magical solutions. They must be seen for what they can be: tools to restore contacts, autonomy, security and a sense of belonging. A review published on Public Health Reviews on cohousing models it found evidence that suggests possible benefits for health and well-being, especially in reducing loneliness among the elderly and improving the quality of life.
Of course, putting elderly people in the same building does not automatically create community. We need well-designed common spaces, clear rules, the possibility of being together and the possibility of closing the door. Practical help is needed without infantilization, respect for character, even when the character is not tender, pacified, like an advertising grandfather. Life together also includes friction, dislikes, noises, boundaries, arguments over the condominium washing machine and the volume of the television.
And then The Boroughswith its monsters, its unlikely pensioners and its too-bright desert, intercepts something that is already entering the health and social debate: old age cannot be thought of only as assistance. It must also be thought of as a presence, a role, a daily life still capable of generating exchanges. Some days, health starts with a tiny thing: an occupied chair next to yours.
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