Stranger Things' Onscreen Family Is Reuniting, This Time as Spies
It has barely been six months since Hawkins, Indiana, closed its doors for good, but two of its most beloved residents are already plotting their next move together. Netflix announced this week that David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown, who spent five seasons playing surrogate father and daughter on "Stranger Things," will return to screens as an estranged real-world equivalent in a new spy thriller from A24 and acclaimed writer Jack Thorne.
According to the official logline, Harbour will play Matt Wolfe, a disgraced former FBI agent who has reinvented himself as a security consultant after some unspecified fall from grace within the bureau. His estranged daughter Rebecca, played by Brown, has chosen to follow in his footsteps and become an FBI agent herself. The two have not spoken in years, but when Rebecca vanishes during a mission gone wrong, her father is forced to step back into a profession that has moved on without him, using skills that are now several years out of date against a landscape of espionage he no longer fully understands.
Thorne is no stranger to turning prestige source material into must-watch television. He is best known for co-creating the Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning series "Adolescence," which became one of the most-watched English-language shows in Netflix's history, and he previously collaborated with Brown on the studio's "Enola Holmes" film franchise. He also recently adapted William Golding's classic novel "Lord of the Flies" for the streamer. Thorne will write and executive produce the new spy series alongside Harbour and Brown, who are both attached to star and produce.
Netflix's head of scripted series for the U.S. and Canada, Jinny Howe, framed the project as a reunion built on existing trust rather than a calculated stunt. "We are delighted to bring this spy drama to life with an extraordinary group of talent we've been fortunate to collaborate with before," she said in a statement, adding that Thorne's gift for finding "the deeply human story inside a thriller" made him the right choice to reintroduce Harbour and Brown to audiences as adversaries on opposite sides of a crisis rather than a united front against monsters.
The series will be produced in part by people close to Brown personally. Her husband, Jake Bongiovi, and her father, Robert Brown, will executive produce through Brown's own production company, PCMA Productions, alongside additional producers from Cut To and Bravo Axolotl.
The announcement also effectively closes the book on a rockier chapter in the Harbour-Brown relationship. Harbour had previously been the subject of tabloid reporting claiming Brown filed bullying and harassment complaints against him with producers during production of "Stranger Things'" final stretch. Rather than avoid the subject, Harbour addressed it candidly earlier this month, comparing the friction to ordinary family conflict stretched out under unusual pressure. He pointed to the simple fact of having spent a decade working alongside someone through their formative teenage years as something bound to produce the occasional disagreement, the kind that in an ordinary family gets resolved privately.
Discussing their future together, Harbour said simply that a decade of working together hadn't been enough, and that audiences would be seeing more of the two of them, describing a connection between them defined by mutual affection. Brown has echoed that sentiment publicly as well, telling a podcast audience this week that while their on-camera partnership will always be tied to Netflix, this new project came together faster than she expected.
No premiere date or title has been announced for the series, which joins a growing slate of high-profile Netflix dramas currently in development.
