Stranger Things 3 will have even more Dad Steve, don’t worry

Steve Harrington made a big splash with fans in the second season of Stranger Things, and on the red carpet of PaleyFest this weekend, executive producer Shawn Levy told press that the next season of the show would not be leaving him behind.

“We’ll definitely get to see some more of Steve Harrington in season three,” Levy said, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “and I’ll just say we won’t be abandoning the Dad Steve magic. I don’t want to say much more, but I literally feel that we were walking along and we stumbled onto a gold mine with Dad Steve.”

By “Dad Steve,” Levy refers to the end of a transition Steve Harrington made over the course of Stranger Things 2, from Nancy Wheeler’s ill-matched boyfriend to protector and ally of the show’s brace of child characters. Steve’s responsible half-minding, half-enabling of Mike, Lucas, Max and especially Dustin appealed to many Stranger Things fans, beyond his coiffed hair and nail-studded baseball bat. And the fact that the young actor who plays him, Joe Keery, is pretty good at Twitter helped, too.

So if you liked that Steve drove Dustin to the winter dance, while giving him advice on girls and hair care, you’ll be happy to know that the folks behind Stranger Things as just as much a fan of Dad Steve as you. And the time we return to Stranger Things — a third season begins filming within a month — he’ll have half a year of more dad experience under his belt, as the show will be set in the summer of 1985.