Netflix’s The Boroughs arrived on Thursday as an eight-episode supernatural mystery built in New Mexico from the ground up. The series, which follows a group of retirees in a retirement community as they fight monsters and become unlikely heroes, was filmed across more than 20 sites in the state over roughly six months in 2024 and 2025.
The production used more than 300 local vendors and employed 350 cast and crew, making it one of the larger recent screen projects to move through New Mexico’s locations business. Among the sites was the former outlet mall between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, which appears in the series as The Boroughs, along with the old Ramada hotel now known as Juniper Flats at 25 Hotel NE in Albuquerque.
Jeffrey Addiss created the show’s concept with Will Matthews, while Matt and Ross Duffer served as executive producers. The cast includes Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, Alfre Woodard and Clarke Peters. The Duffer brothers, who are behind Stranger Things, also brought that production to New Mexico for its fourth season, giving the state another turn as a backdrop for a genre series built around ordinary places that hide something darker.
That fit was part of the appeal for the team behind the series. Matthews said he and the production wanted a desert setting and believed it was the right place for the show because it feels like its own world, slightly cut off and bubble-like, beautiful but vulnerable. That sense of isolation is baked into the story of The Boroughs, a retirement community that looks picturesque while holding dark secrets underneath.
For location scout Shani Orona, who has worked in film for 25 years, the job begins with translating what a production wants into something real on the ground. She said it is her responsibility to understand the filmmakers’ vision and then go out and find it, adding that she never stops scouting. That search can happen anywhere, from grocery runs to road trips, where she is always watching for unusual locations or even something as ordinary as a dirt road that a cinematographer might want.
The show’s New Mexico footprint matters because it spread far beyond a single set and pulled in vendors, crews and locations across the state. It also highlights how the series borrows its atmosphere from the landscape itself: a retirement community that seems calm on the surface, a former mall turned into a fictional world and a hotel repurposed for a supernatural story. For viewers, the next question is not where it was made. It is how long the illusion holds before the monsters inside The Boroughs force the community to break open.
