Stranger Things: was Jonathan and Nancy scene from season 1 edited on Netflix - TikTok rumour explained

Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer have been accused of going back and changing scenes from earlier seasons of the Netflix hit series.

While going back into the editing room for something that has already been released isn’t exactly anything new - like removing the infamous coffee cup in Game of Thrones, or person wearing denim in The Mandalorian - some fans of the show have claimed that Stranger Things went a step further than simply fixing a minor mistake.

So, what’s really going on? This is what you need to know.

Where did the claim come from?

The question of whether Stranger Things has been edited post-release came about after an interview with Variety in which creators Matt and Ross Duffer said that they were going to “George Lucas” a few things that had cropped up in the show, referring to Lucas’ habit of tweaking his films after they had already been released.

Fans noticed that an episode took place in season four on 22 March, what should have been Will Byers’ birthday, but with no mention of it being his birthday, the Duffer brothers admitted to making a mistake.

Matt Duffer said: “We’re thinking [Will’s] new birthday is going to be May 22, because “May” can fit in Winona [Ryder’s] mouth [in the scene in season two where she says his birthday].

“So that would be us George Lucas-ing the situation.”

In a followup interview with Variety, Matt added that it would just be too sad if the characters (and his own mother) all forgot Will’s birthday, and that it “doesn’t make any narrative sense” to have that be the official line.

Matt said: “We were talking about it yesterday, and I think we’re going to George Lucas that.”

He also added: “We have George Lucas’d things also that people don’t know about.”

From there, a rumour got started that the creators had started making much larger edits to the previous seasons of the Netflix hit show - most notably a scene from the first season in which Jonathan (played by Charlie Heaton) is seen photographing Nancy (Natalia Dyer) outside her boyfriends house without her knowing.

Whilst taking pictures of her, Nancy then begins to undress, and Jonathan lowers his camera for a moment, clearly showing understanding that he would be crossing the line if he continued to take pictures.

Fans have claimed that in the so-called original cut, Jonathan then raises his camera in order to deliberately take pictures of Nancy in a state of undress, but in the episode, Jonathan does no such thing and doesn’t take any pictures of Nancy after she has taken off her shirt.

A reason that viewers are convinced the scene has been altered is because, in the third episode, when Steve (Joe Keery) and his friends find Jonathan’s pictures after having been developed in the dark room, one of the pictures shows Nancy in her bra, just as she was taking off her top - but we don’t actually see Jonathan taking that picture when he was outside Steve’s house.

Viewers on TikTok have claimed that the change was made in order to make Jonathan “look like less of a perv”.

Things then moved from TikTok to the mainstream after British GQ reported in an article that the Duffer brothers had made the change to the scene with Jonathan and Nancy.

Are previous seasons of Stranger Things being edited on Netflix?

In short, not really - previous seasons of Stranger Things have not been retroactively edited on Netflix.

On Wednesday (27 July), the official Stranger Things writers Twitter account debunked the rumour by quote tweeting the article from British GQ, and added: “It’s hilarious that an article bashing the show for retroactively editing a scene (based off a false TikTok rumour) has now had to retroactively edit their own article. Oops [laughing emoji]”

The previous day, the account also put out a tweet which said: “PSA: no scenes from previous seasons have ever been cut or re-edited. And they never will be.”

One person replied to the tweet asking, “So that counts for the Jonathan spying on Nancy scene in S01, as many people believe?”, to which the writer’s account said: “Yes.”

Ethan Anderton from Slash Film also put the question to rest by comparing the scene on Netflix to that from the Blu-ray DVD.

Anderton wrote: “As a physical media nerd, I have both the first and second seasons of Stranger Things on Blu-ray. As soon as this claim started making the rounds, I got out my season one discs and tossed them in my Blu-ray player.

“Though there are several articles out there claiming fans with their DVDs have confirmed this edit to be real, that’s simply not the case.”

The article in question from British GQ has since been updated with a correction which states: “A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.”