When Stranger Things debuted, it revived a love for small-town myths, scientific overreach and adolescent loyalty. Hawkins, the town in the show, felt ordinary until it was not, a place where conspiracy was atmosphere and disappearance was mythology.
With the series now finished, following its debut in 2016, viewers looking for something similar have several strong options.
The following four shows share those core pillars: portals that rearrange identity; institutions that hide the truth; children who vanish into myth; and a town or universe shaped by consequence.
Dark
This Netflix show is one of the streaming giant’s most intricately plotted science-fiction mysteries. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, the German series premiered in 2017 and ran for three seasons, concluding in 2020.
The mystery ignites when children vanish in Winden, a town riddled with caves that conceal a wormhole linking timelines. Disappearances start the chain reaction, but the conspiracy is inherited, not solved. A 33-year cycle entangles four families, forcing characters to confront alternate versions of themselves as an audit of identity, consequence, and grief.
The town’s nuclear plant anchors the mythology, its experiments destabilising mirrored worlds where cause and effect collapse into recurrence. Louis Hofmann’s Jonas and Lisa Vicari’s Martha become the emotional and narrative pivots, their fates bound to choices that feel pre-written, recursive, and impossible to outrun.
Netflix streams all three seasons of the show. Arabic subtitles are supported across the region, with dubbing available in several languages.
The OA
Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, this show also premiered on Netflix in 2016, running for two seasons until its cancellation in 2019. It begins when Prairie Johnson returns after seven years missing, her sight restored and her identity rewritten by captivity and experimentation.
A secretive scientist, Dr “Hap” Percy, studies people with near-death histories to test if consciousness can cross dimensions, turning science into violation and dimensional travel into metaphysical rupture. Unlike the outward portals of Stranger Things, The OA treats alternate worlds as psychological thresholds, interpreted rather than fought.
Cancelled after two seasons, it endures as a cult staple for viewers who want speculative storytelling that feels sincere, strange and unafraid of narrative risk. Both seasons stream on Netflix across the Middle East with Arabic subtitles supported.
Fringe
Long before Hawkins made secret laboratories iconic, Fringe had already built a multiverse out of them. Created by JJ Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the American sci-fi series premiered on Fox in 2008 and ran for five seasons until 2013.
The show follows FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), eccentric scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his son Peter (Joshua Jackson), as they investigate dimensional rupture, fringe bioengineering, speculative neuroscience and conspiracies that feel uncovered rather than explained.
At its best, Fringe treated dimensional rupture as consequence, not theory. Bishop’s experiments warp parallel universes out of emotional desperation, his brilliance bound to guilt rather than control. Dunham embodied the show’s thesis that mirrored worlds interrogate identity instead of reflecting it.
The fraught bond between Walter and his son Peter grounded the mythology in a story about rebuilt family and inherited fallout. Fringe can be watched in the Middle East through purchase on Apple TV.
It: Welcome to Derry
Created by Andy and Barbara Muschietti, this prequel to the It films premiered on HBO in October. The show deepens the mythology of Derry, Maine, in the 1960s. Like Hawkins, the horror begins with disappearance. But here the dread is older, predatory, cyclical, and infrastructural, shaping the identity of the town, not just the people who vanish inside it.
It shares Hawkins’ foundations: missing children, failing institutions, and a town shaped by recurring, predatory dread. Welcome to Derry deepens Pennywise’s mythology, treating the town itself as infected by cyclic terror where adults are powerless and consequence is inherited. It swaps Hawkins’ adventure-horror blend for unfiltered, franchise cosmic horror rooted in place, memory, and repeating dread.
The show’s first season can be enjoyed on OSN+ with Arabic subtitles available.
