Anyone who complains about having a job where they're paid to watch movies and TV probably hasn't ever had an actual job. Being a movie or TV critic is a job where, worst case scenario, you might have to sit through a Kevin James movie you aren't particularly excited about. It is not a difficult job, and—unlike other jobs—there are rarely major obstacles to navigate.

That said, sometimes things do make the job a little trickier—like embargoes, the agreed-on dates for when a review can be posted, and spoiler lists, which aren't super common but occasionally pop up.

Believe it or not, good movie and TV critics—the ones who're actually worth reading, the ones who help shape and brighten peoples' experiences with and interpretations of what they watch—tend to really really love the stuff they write about, and the last thing they want to do is ruin it for anyone. For big-deal, top-secret productions where plot details might be important to the audience's enjoyment, though, there'll sometimes be requests from the studio, distributor, or director, asking critics to not reveal a few key scenes or twists. ("The studio has been unusually insistent in its pleas to critics not to reveal plot points," wrote A.O. Scott in his review of Blade Runner 2049. "That's fair enough, but it's also evidence of how imaginatively impoverished big-budget movies have become.")

All this is to say that we were going to review Stranger Things 3, but in this case, Netflix is being, to borrow a phrase, unusually insistent regarding spoilers. To the point where there's nothing we can really talk about, at all.

Stranger Things 3 streams Thurs July 4 on Netflix.