David Harbour wears a Casio Vintage

Jim Hopper runs the police department in Hawkins, Indiana, which in the fall of 1983 means paperwork on missing cats until a local boy vanishes on his way home and the case opens onto something no small-town cop is equipped for. David Harbour plays him as a hungover wreck with a badge, a man who lost a daughter and most of his sleep, working the disappearance in a rumpled uniform with a cigarette already going.

The watch on his wrist is a Casio, and a cheap one. The show's prop master, Lynda Reiss, chose it: a vintage silver digital on a steel bracelet, the barrel-cased B640, its black LCD reading CASIO, WATER RESIST 50M, ILLUMINATOR. Casio still sells the thing new for about forty dollars. It suits Hopper, a watch with nothing to wind and no name to live up to, just a battery and a backlight for a man who counts his life in shifts. The pick was not entirely Reiss's, since by her account the prop department finds the watches and presents them and the actor usually makes the final call, which makes the Casio partly Harbour's own choice.

Reiss has dressed wrists on Stranger Things, True Detective, and a long list of productions, some of them wearing watches that cost more than the chief of Hawkins earns in a month. The forty-dollar Casio is the one she told GQ is her favorite piece she has ever put on screen.