Season #: 2, 1
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Critic Reviews
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This version is updated with interesting plots, clever dialogue, and lots of pop culture references. While some pre-teens will enjoy it, it feels like the target audience skews a touch older thanks to some genuine creepiness throughout.
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Ultimately, "Goosebumps" isn't reinventing the wheel, but is instead an amalgamation of a variety of well-loved ideas and themes and given a fresh new spin. Which was, at its core, exactly what R.L. Stine was doing with his original book series. As such, this makes this new series the best adaptation of "Goosebumps" yet.
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It’s kind of remarkable what the Goosebumps team has done here: taken a campy horror franchise and made it resonant, managing to mix frights and feels.
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The new "Goosebumps" strikes a nice balance. You'll be on edge, without falling out of your seat.
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What is so frustrating about this is that, when Goosebumps forgets about this and goes straight to the core of what Stine’s books were, it can be an absolute blast. The two episodes available at launch both have moments of giddy delight.
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Rob Letterman and Nicholas Stoller’s series adaptation increasingly gets bogged down trying to deliver supernatural horror and angsty teen drama and a thoughtful rumination on how the mistakes of the past generation can reverberate into the present. Still, there’s adequate heart and humor and (TV-PG) gore here to serve as an amiable intro to horror for the adolescent set.
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I gradually warmed up to its cast, and its teen drama improved with time, but its first few episodes were only serviceable. Although it has redeeming qualities like its central intrigue, its formulaic scares and initially archetypal characters feel too by the book.
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The biggest problem is that, in trying to please everyone coming to the series and their respective expectations of what Goosebumps should be, this newest incarnation remains trapped in a limbo of its own creation that it can’t break free from.
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What starts as an enjoyable, mature take on Stine's classic series with some inventiveness in its structure and storytelling becomes a generic horror series built to keep the "Stranger Things" crowd happy as they wait for their favorite show's final season.
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Stine's work isn't the most natural fit for a Stranger Things-style streaming melodrama; the adolescent fun of the books gets a little lost in translation.
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Jostling against these pleasingly spooky storylines is an obvious desire to perform as the very model of a modern Disney+ show, for better and worse.
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Instead of streamlining things for a refined first season, following perhaps just one or two of the teens closely and expanding as it progressed into later seasons, the show is a lump of bland YA themes with a sprinkle of Halloween for flair.