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The fifth and final season of Netflixs Stranger Things is dropping on Netflix just in time for Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And also New Years Eve. The industry-leading streaming service, whose stock reached a record high on Monday after the weekends successful Tudum 2025 event, just announced that the conclusion to its monster hit series will arrive in three batches. The first four episodes are set to debut on November 26 (the day before Thanksgiving) at 8pm ET, the following three air on Christmas Day at the same time, and the final episode will come out on New Years Eve, also at 8pm ET. Its an innovative, carefully calibrated twist on the staggered streaming release schedule, although some fans seem to find Netflixs upcoming stranglehold on holiday viewing as diabolical as a demogorgon. Streaming services can go any number of ways these days when putting out a new season of a beloved show. As they assess the right drop pattern, executives tend to consider target audience, episode length, and total number of episodes, alongside other less tangible factors such as whether the show has a 10-hour movie-style continuous story, lending itself more to the binge model, or an intense character-study vibe, which smolders as its doled out. Netflix has been breaking up hits like Bridgerton into two batched binges for years, while Hulu sticks with full-binge for The Bear, Prime Video offers three episodes to kick off The Boys before slowing down with weekly episodes, and Maxs Hacks sometimes airs an episode or two per week with seemingly no rhyme or reason. If it could be said that there are any rules to how a streamer releases a hot show, these services are rewriting and codifying them in real time. When Netflix released the most recent season of Stranger Things three summers ago, it set out to monopolize two close-together holidays: Memorial Day and July 4th. The first volume of the fourth season arrived on May 27, 2022, with seven episodes, and then concluded on July 1, with two more. It proved a successful scheduling gambit. All told, the season racked up a seismic 1.352 billion hours of viewing in its first 28 days, ranking as Netflix’s most-watched English-language series, and second overall after the first season of Squid Game. Even more impressive, the fourth season of Stranger Things had no small part in helping the company add 2.41 million subscribers in Q3 2022, when it dropped. Netflixs approach to scheduling the final season of Stranger Things takes that blatant holiday-ownership approach a step further, though. By stretching out the season across three major end-of-year holidaysduring which families are frequently hunkered down together, hunting for crowd-pleasing popcorn fareNetflix is capitalizing on its captive audience. As if to underscore the point, the service is bumping up its usual 3am ET drop time for new releases to what is known in terrestrial TV world as prime time, at 8pm ET, when families are more likely to fill up couches together. Its an ingenuous tactic for driving up end-of-year subscriptions, one that will almost certainly end up breaking viewership records. But it also feels rather brazen in its attempt to conquer all family holidays with a gargantuan four-quadrant hit. When Netflix offered a holiday release for the second season of Squid Game last year, for instance, the service waited until the day after Christmasperhaps out of respect for the sanctity of the holiday, or in fear of being crowded out by too many Home Alone, Elf and National Lampoons Christmas Vacation viewingsand dropped the entire season all at once. This year, Netflix is owning its ambition to dominate the holidays. (To that end, its also building on last years Christmas Day NFL games, which collectively attracted 65 million U.S. viewers, a record for most-streamed NFL games ever, with two more Christmas Day games.) The service clearly has faith that the draw of Stranger Things wrapping up is enough to put A Muppet Christmas Carol and its ilk on the backburner for one year. Plenty of Stranger Things fans are only too happy to have their family time supplemented by the suburban, supernatural hijinks of the worlds most twentysomething teens. Guess Im spending the holidays in Hawkins this year, a typical commenter replied to Netflixs tweet announcing the release dates. (And were happy to have ya nerd, Netflix wrote back.) Not all fans were as excited, though, about the way the final season is being teased out. Some of them complained about Netflix breaking up the conclusion theyve been waiting three years for into three chunks, prolonging their anticipation. Others seem more opposed to the idea of Netflix encroaching on so much family time with an offer Stranger Things fans cant refusethe TV equivalent of bumping up Black Friday deals to Thursday around dinner time. All of them will likely tune in to watch, though, along with a billion or two fellow subscribers. If the grand finale succeeds at the level Netflix expects it to, perhaps the end of Stranger Things will spell the beginning of a new arms race for holiday streaming content, launching in 2026.
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If you missed the northern lights, or aurora borealis, over the past weekend, you’re in luckyou may have a second chance tonight, Monday, June 2, when they may be visible for a second night in a row in some U.S. states across the country. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasts that the next possibility for viewing the northern lights is Monday night into early Tuesday, with the most intense activity across Canada and Alaska and the northern U.S. states. This aurora borealis is the result of a geomagnetic storm that occurs when a coronal mass ejection (CME), an eruption of solar material, reaches Earth and causes swaths of blue, green, and purple in the sky. This years increased solar activity is likely the result of an 11-year sun cycle peaking through October. Where and when will the northern lights be visible tonight? While NOAA predicts Alaska is the best U.S. state to potentially view the aurora tonight, the agency says: “The other states that are best positioned are the northern Midwest states, from Washington, northern Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan,” Alex Gianninas, an astronomy professor at Connecticut College told Newsweek. Residents of northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine may also be able to witness the light show in the night sky, Gianninas added. The aurora borealis is best observed just after sunset or just before sunrise. Dont worry if you aren’t able to see the northern lights tonightNOAA predicts activity will remain high through 2025 and 2026. You can track the aurora on NOAAs page, where the agency is providing updates.
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President Donald Trumps administration on Monday renewed its request for the Supreme Court to clear the way for plans to downsize the federal workforce while a lawsuit filed by labor unions and cities proceeds. The high court filing came after an appeals court refused to freeze a California-based judges order halting the cuts, which have been led by the Department of Government Efficiency. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the downsizing could have broader effects, including on the nations food-safety system and health care for veterans. In her ruling last month, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston found that Trumps administration lacked congressional approval to make sizable reductions to the federal workforce. The administration initially asked the justices to step in last month, but withdrew its appeal for technical, legal reasons. The latest filing is one in a series of emergency appeals arguing federal judges had overstepped their authority. Illston’s order rests on the indefensible premise that the president needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the executive branch,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the new appeal. Trump has repeatedly said voters gave him a mandate to remake the federal government, and he tapped billionaire ally Elon Musk to lead the charge through DOGE. Musk left his role last week. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs, or have been placed on leave. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation, and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go. Illstons order directs numerous federal agencies to halt acting on the presidents workforce executive order signed in February and a subsequent memo issued by DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management. Illston was nominated by former Democratic President Bill Clinton. Among the agencies affected by the order are the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Labor, the Interior, State, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. It also applies to the National Science Foundation, Small Business Association, Social Security Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency. The Supreme Court set a deadline of next Monday for a response from the unions and cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco. Some of the labor unions and nonprofit groups are also plaintiffs in another lawsuit before a San Francisco judge challenging the mass firings of probationary workers. In that case, Judge William Alsup ordered the government in March to reinstate those workers, but the U.S. Supreme Court later blocked his order. By Mark Sherman, Associated Press
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