Q&A Hollywood

Q:When is“Stranger Things” coming back?

A: It’s a little early to even be asking that question, but since you have, the best estimate is sometime in 2025.

Filming of “Stranger Things” Season 5 is starting this spring, but it’s a huge, lavish show with complicated effects and a big cast, so the turnaround from filming to release will take a while.

The big concern this raises is, of course, the age of the cast. The previous four instalments of “Stranger Things” were each set a year apart, even though they aired over seven years. As a result, the age gap between the actors and their supposedly teenage characters has grown. When 2025 rolls around, the once-adorable kids will all be in their 20s.

But the show’s producers have said there will be a more significant time jump between the fourth and fifth seasons. This will allow the characters to catch up to their actors and will advance the show’s plot toward the big finale (the fifth season will also be the last).

Without spoiling Season 4 too much, things end with the show’s fictional setting of Hawkins, Ind., under the biggest threat yet from the parallel dimension (“the Upside Down,” in the show’s parlance), and that threat will only grow in the intervening years.

Of course, fans’ impatience will only grow as well. It’s already been almost a year since the final fourthseason episodes dropped.

On a side note, if you’re really desperate, you can fly over to London, England, to see a prequel play being staged later this year. “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” was written by series writer Kate Trefry, with support (and, more importantly, blessing) for the story from series creators Matt and Ross Duffer.

Q: I’ve noticed Dick Wolf’s name pop up in so many things — most recently “Law & Order” and the “Chicago One” franchise. Has he done anything other than dramas?

A: Not with any great success. TV superproducer Dick Wolf dabbled a little in other genres, particularly back in the ‘80s when he was just a screenwriter for hire. But he soon found his niche producing procedural crime shows, and he never really looked back.

Wolf’s earliest credits are certainly his weirdest. He started out as an advertising copy writer with dreams of writing movies, and his first two produced screenplays were a couple of now-forgotten underdog comedies, “Skateboard” (1978) and “Gas” (1981).

But soon he was working as a staff writer on TV cop hits “Hill Street Blues” and “Miami Vice,” the latter of which eventually promoted him to co-executive producer.

For a while he kept dabbling with the cinema, leading to another surprising entry on his resume: the 1992 socialissues teen drama “School Ties.” It starred Brendan Fraser (“The Mummy,” 1999) as a young, working-class student who earns a sports scholarship to attend an elite private school but is forced to keep his Jewish faith a secret. This one was at least in the dramatic genre, but there wasn’t a single exhausted beat cop or self-sacrificing firefighter to be found, so it remains off the Dick Wolf brand.

Indeed, that brand was already being established. His defining series, “Law & Order,” had already debuted by that point (in 1990, to be exact), and Wolf soon had little time for these big-screen sidelines. By the time “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” — the first of many spinoffs — debuted in 1999, Wolf was basically a full-time procedural producer.

Almost. One more oddball entry has shown up on his resume since: he produced the 2009 documentary “When You’re Strange,” about legendary psychedelic rock band The Doors. This was a labor of love on his part — promoting the film at the time, he said he bought their debut album “the day it came out” and was a lifelong fan from then on.

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