The Duffer Brothers may or may not have expected their Netflix series Stranger Things to become a runaway hit, but one thing they most definitely did not expect was the outpouring of sympathy for the character of Barb, Nancy Wheeler’s unappreciated best friend who viewers rallied around despite the fact that she barely appeared in half of the episodes. Really?? The entire community is going to band together over Will Byers but then nobody gives a single, solitary sh*t that a teenage girl also goes missing?
In an attempt to rectify this egregious mistake ahead of the second season (which will actually explore Barb’s disappearance, allegedly), Netflix released this short video of an “archival newsreel from 5 WIYZ Hawkins, Indiana.” In the clip, anchor Brenda Wood reports on the disappearance of Barbara Holland, a student she describes as “loyal to a fault to Nancy, the kind of girl who notices if you’re wearing a new bra and can really rock a pair of mom jeans, or — as we call them now — ‘jeans.'”
Of course that wasn’t the only big news in Hawkins, Indiana that week, as Woods also covered a bizarre shoplifting incident as Bradley’s Big Buy involving a vagrant juvenile who “escaped with an unprecedented number of Eggo waffles.”
