This New Show Is The 'Riverdale' & 'Stranger Things' Mash-Up You Didn't Know You Needed

After premiering in the UK last year, The A List will make its international debut Aug. 30 on Netflix, and fans of teen thrillers are going to want to mark their calendars. A story like this is bound to come with twists and turns — and very likely a big cliffhanger — but while an A List Season 2 has yet to be ordered, there's reason to believe the show will be back to tie up any loose ends. The move to Netflix almost guarantees a larger audience, and it doesn't hurt that the series takes inspiration from two other fan favorite shows: Riverdale and Stranger Things.

Like Riverdale, the A List follows a group of teens navigating popularity, romance, and drama. But rather than being in the gloomy, nondescript halls of Riverdale High, they're on the mysterious Peregrine Island, just off the coast of Scotland. What appears to at first be a case of popularity politics between Queen Bee Amber and new arrival Mia quickly becomes something far creepier: it's revealed in the trailer that the camp actually closed down the previous year because someone died, and Amber is later seen showering in blood. The series has been described as a supernatural thriller, so that's where the Stranger Things connection comes in.

But while the A List's creative team has confirmed they drew inspiration from Riverdale and Stranger Things, they also aimed to do something different and make it stand out amid the growing slate of dark teen dramas. "What we weren't trying to do was copy [those shows], we were looking at them for reference and interest and the wonderful twists and turns in their stories," A List executive producer Anne Brogan told Metro UK. The one thing the shows all absolutely have in common? "Whenever you think you understand where the story is going, it twists and takes you in a different direction," Brogan continued.

Considering The A List originally aired in October of 2018, almost a year has gone by without any news about whether or not the series will return, but many of the show's cast have expressed hope for the chance to reprise their A List roles. Ellie Duckles, who plays the villainous Amber, told BBC that "for a lot of us [A List] is our first, big job and we had such a great time filming it ... Hopefully if we get a second season, it will be really interesting to see where all the characters go!"

Jacob Dudman, who plays Dev, echoed this sentiment, telling BBC, "I hope the show continues to grow and becomes more epic and bigger in scale and gets a second series, a bigger budget and let's see what happens!"

The cast is clearly onboard to come back for a second season; now, it all depends on whether or not Netflix decides to order more episodes. But with the show landing on a major streaming platform with thousands more viewers, hopefully that will be the boost it needs to secure a renewal.