Review: 'The Boroughs' brings a lively group of seniors into a predictable sci-fi adventure

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What do we have here? Some of my very favorite actors — Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Geena Davis — starring in an eight-episode, B-grade sci-fi comedy-drama, “The Boroughs,” now streaming on Netflix.Molina plays Sam Cooper, a retired engineer — that will be important — being brought grumbling to the Boroughs, a posh, city-sized retirement community plopped down in the middle of the Southwestern desert.Sam’s late wife, Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, in flashbacks and dreams), had planned the move, but she died suddenly, while they were dancing to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which will become a kind of trigger and motif going forth.

Still, fate — in the form of daughter Claire (Jena Malone) and son-in-law Neil (Rafael Casal) — has pushed him solo to the Boroughs and a house on a cul-de-sac.(Seen from above, the town is laid out in a series of concentric circles, as EPCOT was meant to be when Walt Disney was alive and it stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

That has no relation to this show; I’m just throwing it out to the fans.)Before this happens, however, we get a preamble.Is that Dee Wallace, the mother from “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,” as Grace, a former occupant of Sam’s new home? (Why, yes it is.) Grabbed one night by something clearly not human, she’ll leave the show before the first credit rolls; but we’ll know from the start that there’s a monster on the loose.

And even before Sam has settled in, he’ll be attacked by her now-widowed husband, Edward (Ed Begley Jr.), who has escaped to his old house from the Manor — a memory care unit more reminiscent of something out of “Squid Game” than anywhere you’d want to park a beloved fading parent — muttering “The key is in the light, the owl is in the wall,” and thereby turning Sam detective.The joint is run by young Blaine Shaw (Seth Numr...