Netflix released all eight episodes of The Boroughs on May 21, and Alfred Molina is the one who has to carry viewers through its darkest turns as Sam Cooper, a fiercely independent retired engineer who moves into a senior living community shortly after losing his wife. By Episode 1, the show has already turned the place into something far stranger than a quiet retirement home. Ghostly apparitions and mysterious disappearances begin after Sam arrives, and one neighbor is mutilated by a monster before the opening hour is over.
Molina, 73, gives Sam a wary intelligence that fits a man trying to keep his footing in a place that seems to change around him. He said the showrunners gave him the basic outline of where the story was headed, what they wanted the tone to feel like and how the season would unfold. “I’d love to, but are they aware that I’ve never done a TV show that’s lasted more than one season?” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t open with that if I were you.”
That sense of uncertainty gives the cast of the boroughs its charge. Sam meets neighbors played by Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare, while the longtime owners, played by Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg, begin to look less like caretakers than predators. The series was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer, but it is Molina’s skeptical, grief-struck turn that anchors the story as the oddness around him escalates.
The show’s central conceit is that the owners have been draining the life from their elderly patrons in order to achieve immortality through the energy of a magical matriarch known as Mother. By the finale, Sam and his friends break into headquarters, kidnap Mother and take her back to the desert cave where her powers first took root. The season ends without pretending the danger is gone. The characters are still living in The Boroughs, and they know exactly what kind of place it is now.
That ending matters because the series does not close the loop on its supernatural threat; it leaves the residents inside the community with the full knowledge that the hauntings and disappearances were not random at all. Molina’s recent run only sharpens the contrast. In the same year, he appeared in the indie dramedy When We Get There and voiced the octopus Marcellus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a reminder that he has moved easily between comic, intimate and eerie material. Here, the horror is less about spectacle than the slow realization that the place Sam entered to grieve has been feeding on the people who live there.
