Our scene begins with a young woman walking through a California town. The Lost Boys is playing at the cinema and a car goes past with Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the stereo.

Just in case the point isn’t already made, the woman walks past an electronics store in which Max Headroom is snarling out of every television set. The only way the point could be made any clearer would be if Rick Astley, Alf the alien, Gary Coleman and Tiffany cartwheeled across the screen screeching: “Welcome to 1987, dudes!”

Thus begins San Junipero, the fourth episode from the latest series of Black Mirror, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis. It is, as audiences have almost come to take for granted from the show, a genre-defying exploration of death, technology, love and all those other Black Mirror bugbears. But in terms of its setting, it is unusually on-trend.

Not since the actual 80s have there been so many TV shows set in that decade. When it comes to period drama on TV, oversized denim jackets are the new corsets, and these shows are as loved by critics as they are by audiences. Deutschland 83 and The Americans reimagined, in very different ways, the cold war of the 80s, while Halt And Catch Fire is a pleasingly clever look at the tech world in that decade (starring, incidentally, Mackenzie Davis, apparently the go-to woman for 80s-set drama). The delightful Red Oaks on Amazon Prime, and The Goldbergs, comedian Adam Goldberg’s sitcom based on his 80s childhood, take a more traditional tack, riffing on the kitschiness of the decade.

Both shows feel as if they are inspired by specific 80s pop culture: The Goldbergs, with its sentimental voiceover and fond if unsentimental depiction of family life, is clearly the admiring grandchild of The Wonder Years and Roseanne; the setup for Red Oaks, with an awestruck kid working at a posh summer club, is decidedly reminiscent of the 1984 Matt Dillon film The Flamingo Kid. There is even an episode in the first series using that most 80s of all plots: a parent-and-child body swap.

Then there is Stranger Things, Netflix’s blockbuster of all the 80s-inspired shows, which is coming back for a second series in the autumn. It was itself based on 80s movie blockbusters, patchworked together so smoothly the effect was like perfectly sampled 80s hip-hop jam, making you appreciate the originals anew while simultaneously enjoying the modern take.

Karen (Gage Golightly) in Amazon Prime’s Red Oaks. Photograph: Jessica Miglio

On top of all this, two very different pop culture icons from the 80s are being revived for TV: at one end of the spectrum, Spike Lee is remaking his landmark movie about African-American life and female sexuality, She’s Gotta Have It, as a TV series for Netflix; and at the other, US Channel The CW is planning a Dynasty reboot and remakes of LA Law, Fame and Knight Rider. TV versions of American Gigolo and Dirty Dancing are also in various stages of development. Meanwhile, a small-screen update of buddy-cop thriller Lethal Weapon airs on ITV from next month.

Despite being one of the most politically and culturally reviled decades of all, even in its own time, people have been saying that the 80s are back pretty much since 12.01am on 1 January 1990. In terms of fashion and music, this has long been the case, with both industries mindlessly reviving 80s trends in an alternately nostalgic and gratingly ironic style. In the past few years, the movie business has eagerly hitched itself to the 80s bandwagon, and announcements about upcoming remakes of classic 80s films have become as cliched as the originals often were.

But television’s sudden re-examination of the decade is, in many ways, far more successful. It captures the best of the spirit of that era’s pop culture as opposed to just rehashing its templates, which is what Hollywood has done in exploiting familiar franchise names but forgetting to bother with any heart. Paul Feig’s much-discussed all-female Ghostbusters movie, for example, didn’t quite work, not because all the leads were women, as some idiots claimed, but because it lacked the soul of friendship the original had (as well as a coherent plot and enough good jokes). Stranger Things, by contrast, rather than being hamstrung by its 80s templates, realised that what people love about 80s movies is not the plots but the feelings they provoke.

Back to the future ... Stranger Things. Photograph: Netflix

So instead of just lazily remaking a specific beloved movie, the show’s makers, the Duffer Brothers, took the camaraderie of Stand By Me, the soulfulness of ET, the sci-fi of Firestarter and the teen angst of John Hughes’s movies and spun them into an original story, putting in an occasional specific reference (such as the kids walking along the railway tracks, Stand By Me-style) but jettisoning any comparison-provoking plot parallels. And Stranger Things, like all the 80s-inspired TV shows and pop culture, has a pan-generational appeal.

“I think there’s a lot of nostalgia from millennials because, even though we didn’t live it, we experience it all the time,” says Shannon Purser, who played the archetypal 80s character of Barb in Stranger Things and was born (rather mortifyingly to those of us who can remember the 80s) in 1997. “A lot of us watch 80s movies and listen to 80s music. We like the strong bonds of friendship that were key in those movies.” For this reason, both Stranger Things and Black Mirror’s San Junipero episode are not actually about the 80s at all; they’re about movies from the 80s, the decade refracted through contemporary pop culture. This is why the opening scene of the latter is done with such knowingly heavy hand, ladling on the 80s pop culture references. Even the name of the town is a nod to 80s movies set in similar California towns, such as The Lost Boys (Santa Carla) and Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (San Dimas).

“I wanted it to be a fantasy form of the 1980s,” says Charlie Brooker, who wrote the episode. “Hyper-real, shiny, lots of John Hughes elements, that Cocktail look – and the director was very keen to emulate the feel of those movies. Which was brilliant for us because it meant we could up the cheese factor but for a logical reason.”

Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection

The idea of movies such as The Lost Boys and Cocktail still being discussed 30 years later would have amazed critics at the time, who largely assumed their legacies would last about as long as the taste in a Coca-Cola-flavoured stick of Hubba Bubba. So what is it about 80s movies that have given them such a long-lasting appeal, and why is that appeal best captured now by TV?

It is pretty astonishing to look back at 80s movies now and see how sophisticated, morally, they often were, especially compared to movies today. “I look back in amazement at those 80s movies which I watched when I was a teenager, like Dirty Dancing and Fast Times At Ridgemont High,” says Anna Winger, creator and writer of Deutschland 83. “Teenagers were having abortions and stuff. You could never have that now in a movie, not without it being a big deal.”

John Hughes’s teen films, especially Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful, were explicitly about social-class issues in middle America. Teen girls enjoyed sex lives in movies such as Mystic Pizza and Say Anything. Female leads in romcoms were at least as powerful as the men in the workplace, and often more so (Moonstruck; When Harry Met Sally; Romancing The Stone). Movies could star an African-American lead without it being a major plot point (Beverly Hills Cop; The Golden Child). None of this is true in movies today. Hollywood has become astonishingly conservative and bland in the past 30 years.

The Breakfast Club: Judd Nelson (top), Emilio Estevez (right), Anthony Michael Hall (middle), Ally Sheedy (left) and Molly Ringwald (front). Photograph: MCA/Everett/Rex

Largely, this is because movies are now made for the Far East market as opposed to the western world, and are so expensive to market globally that studios go for the lowest common denominator, which means blockbuster franchises. It’s why movie theatres are filled with interchangable superhero movies instead of mid-market films rooted in the everyday such as The Breakfast Club: explosions are easier to translate than angsty conversations about suburban parents. But, as the enduring popularity of 80s movies proves, those angsty conversations still hold an enormous appeal for today’s teenagers. “TV is now where you can do what you can no longer do in movies,” says Winger. “TV is where you can reflect social issues, contemporary and historical.”

The best 80s movies specialised in painting an expansive emotional canvas born out of the materials of the everyday: Molly Ringwald’s pain at being dumped in Pretty In Pink; Winona Ryder’s secret thrill at taking on her high-school bullies in Heathers; Dolly Parton’s joy in female gossip in Steel Magnolias. Today, this is better captured by multi-episode TV series than explosion-laden movies. (Aptly, the 80s-set San Junipero is the most emotional and tender episode in the current series of Black Mirror.)

And, by chance, the 80s feel is increasingly back politically: Donald Trump, that archetypal figure of power-suited Manhattan, is president of the United States, and the rise of Russian power feels like a reboot of the cold war. So did all these makers of 80s-flavoured TV shows sense this in the air?

“No! We definitely did not have that kind of foresight,” laughs Winger. “I think it’s just that a lot of us now working in TV lived through the 80s, so this is our youth, and it’s recent enough so we can play with the metaphors in a way that’s really interesting to me. But I’m glad I’m working in something historical because I could never make up anything as dramatic as what is happening now.”

Series two of Stranger Things will be on Netflix from 31 October 2017