Every Show That Started After And Ended Before Stranger Things

It's genuinely shocking to realize that "Stranger Things," one of the biggest Netflix hits of all time that centers around a supernaturally plagued fictional town named Hawkins, Indiana, started its run on the popular streamer in 2016. It's 2025, as of this writing, and it's almost 2026; that's a very long time. It's such a long time, in fact, that a bunch of TV shows have started and ended during the sheer amount of time that "Stranger Things" has remained an ongoing story ... and you can check out which specific ones in Looper's original video.

Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that seasons of "Stranger Things" take a while to produce. Those aforementioned supernatural plagues include monsters like Demogorgons and major villains like Vecna (played in and out of heavy prosthetics by Jamie Campbell Bower), and there are plenty of special effects involved like creating the now-famous nether realm known as the "Upside Down." Still, other shows managed to begin and conclude their stories since "Stranger Things" started, and some of them were pretty huge hits.

Not only did some of Netflix's Marvel Cinematic Universe shows, including "Luke Cage," start and end before "Stranger Things" wrapped up, but since "Stranger Things" started airing, HBO's critically adored "Succession" started in 2018 and ended in 2023, earning a ton of Emmys along the way. "The Good Place" began its time on NBC alongside "Stranger Things" and came to a close after four seasons in 2020, and "Atlanta," Donald Glover's ambitious FX comedy, wrapped up in 2022. "This is Us," the NBC tearjerker starring Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia, and "Westworld," the audacious Michael Crichton adaptation on HBO, both ran from 2016 to 2022, while "The Crown," Netflix's encyclopedic look at the long reign of England's Queen Elizabeth II, also kicked off in 2016 and made it to 2023.

Then there's the teen drama "13 Reasons Why," which ran on Netflix from 2017 to 2020, and the FX crime drama "Snowfall," which was led by Idris Elba and aired from 2017 to 2023. "Riverdale" (the absolutely bonkers CW series based very loosely on Archie Comics) and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" (Amy Sherman-Palladino's Amazon Prime Video series about a stand-up comedian played by Rachel Brosnahan) don't have much in common on the surface, but they both ran from 2017 to 2023. Even huge spin-offs like "Young Sheldon" and major adaptations like "The Handmaid's Tale" managed to tell their stories in less time than it took for "Stranger Things" to conclude; the former aired from 2017 to 2024, and the latter from 2017 to 2025.

These shows and more, which you can see in the video, started and ended while "Stranger Things" was still running; the series wraps up on December 31, 2025.