Major spoilers for The Boroughs are ahead! Read with caution, and watch the series with a Netflix subscription.
The Boroughs centers itself around mysterious monsters and the problems they cause in a retirement community. Or, actually, it’s the humans using the monsters who cause the problems. However, before our main gang of retirees figures that out, they have to deal with a lot of odd happenings, including seeing people glitch. I was particularly fascinated by why these glitches were happening, so I asked the creators about it.
Throughout all of The Boroughs, which was just released on Netflix’s 2026 schedule, the main character, Sam (Alfred Molina), has a lot of moments where he thinks he sees his late wife, but then she glitches. It’s unclear why it’s happening until the end, when we meet Mother, the being who is controlling the monsters who have been running around the community all season. It turned out, she was trying to send a message to Sam, and the glitches were that message “gone awry,” as co-creator Will Matthews told me:
The glitches are a manifestation of transmissions gone awry. So someone's trying to send a message to someone, if it doesn't quite get interpreted correctly or received correctly, or there's a little interference in the atmosphere, it can glitch. So it's a way of not reality shifting, but your perception of reality shifting.
The someone Matthews is referring to is Mother. While she seemed to be a villain for the first part of the show, toward the end, it becomes clear that she’s a victim of the people who are running The Boroughs and using her to be immortal. So, she starts sending messages to the old folks living there to try and get help.
That’s partially why Sam keeps seeing his dead wife. Mother is trying to send him a message. However, when she does that, as Matthews pointed out, sometimes her transmissions go wonky, as a radio can, and they glitch. Speaking to that point, Jeffrey Addiss, the other co-creator of this 2026 TV schedule entry, added:
Because we think Mother’s broadcasting a message, right? Say even the birds can hear it, right? That's what causes the birds. And messages like that, transmissions can glitch.
Well, that certainly explains a lot. However, it does not answer all my questions about the glitches. That’s because Season 1 ends with Sam himself glitching, and when I asked the creators about that, they told me they couldn’t answer that question. So, we’ll have to cross our fingers for Season 2.
Notably, The Boroughs was executive produced by the Duffer Brothers, and it features some parallels to Stranger Things for sure. With the way Stranger Things expanded its seasons every year based on the questions raised in the previous installment, I’ve been thinking a lot about the question Season 1 of this new show left me with regarding glitches, and the ways in which said answers could expand this sci-fi world.
So, I feel like there’s more to these glitches. However, the creators' explanations are certainly helpful, and now we know that they are, at their core, “transmissions gone awry.”
