Alfred Molina leads the boroughs cast in The Boroughs, an eight-episode Netflix sci-fi series set in a retirement community in the New Mexico desert. The setup leans on older characters instead of teenagers, which gives the show a different center of gravity from the usual alien-threat story.
Sam, Molina’s character, arrives as a newcomer and quickly senses something is wrong. He then catches an alien creature feeding on neighbors while they sleep, and that discovery pulls him and his newly formed friend group into a larger conspiracy.
Alfred Molina and Sam
Molina plays Sam as a crotchety newcomer, and the role does the heavy lifting in the series’ first turn. Sam is the one who spots the pattern before anyone else, so the story starts as a personal reaction to a strange community and then widens into a group problem.
That choice matters because the show is built around people in their 70s, not the younger cast that usually carries this kind of sci-fi premise. Four decades after the rise of 1980s-style science fiction adventures, The Boroughs keeps the mystery format but shifts its perspective to retirement-age neighbors in the New Mexico desert.
Jack Judy Art Renee Wally
Bill Pullman plays Jack, a perpetually cheerful neighbor, while Alfre Woodard plays Judy, a retired journalist. Clarke Peters plays Art, who wants to get high and play golf, Geena Davis plays Renee, a former big-shot manager in the music industry, and Denis O'Hare plays Wally, a doctor with a long, sad history of losing his loved ones.
Those roles give the series a broader ensemble than a simple monster-of-the-week setup. Each character comes with a specific life history, which makes the friend group feel less like a generic mystery team and more like a circle of people whose baggage is part of the plot.
Eight episodes in New Mexico
The Boroughs runs for eight episodes, and the mystery steadily grows in scale across that stretch. The smaller retirement-community setting gives the series room to start intimate, then open into the larger conspiracy Sam uncovers.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: this is a finite first run, centered on Alfred Molina’s Sam and the older ensemble around him. The show’s most distinctive move is not the alien creature itself, but the decision to place that creature in a community where the residents are in their 70s and still become the ones who have to figure it out.
