Season 1 ended on what seemed like a cliffhanger, but seems to have turned out to be a classic Stine twist instead: No, we won’t be picking up on the brave young heroes of Port Lawrence High, or see how they manage to once again defeat the author’s most popular villain, the evil puppet Slappy the Dummy. Season 2, subtitled The Vanishing, tells a new story in a new locale that follows a group of teenagers in Brooklyn as they become embroiled in a missing persons investigation involving an abandoned research facility. Still, the two-decade formula remains intact in this goosebumps incarnation as the kids unravel the events that have haunted their parents since 1994, when a classmate disappeared during a break-in.

In the present day, the missing boy’s younger brother has become a botanist and single father played by David Schwimmer, who fills the veritable cast of chaperone that Justin Long filled in Season 1. (Talk about a sideways move in the matter of dweeby grown-up star power!)” Don’t go in the basement,” this not-quite-mad-scientist repeatedly warns his twin offspring—one a Type-A overachiever (YouTube star Jayden Bartels), the other a shiftless underachiever (Sam McCarthy) – when they come to stay with him for the summer in Gravesend. Although he’s technically a little old to portray a guy who was a teenager in 1994 (the year Friends premiered!), Schwimmer has fun with the character: He summons the dullness that delivered him to primetime fame, and then—like Long before him – puts a more sinister spin on this seemingly harmless authority figure.

Around the sitcom veteran, Goosebumps gathers another Scooby gang of wholesome high school students, including the misunderstood bad girl (Francesca Noel), whom Bartels’ debate champion ends up romancing, and the nice delivery driver (Elijah M. Cooper), who the others hit up for amusements. The children are having a good time – maybe too much. Even the requisite love triangle reaches an amicable stalemate, as if the showrunners were afraid of making someone unlikable for any length of time. After surviving a brief transformation into a plant-like monster, the most embarrassing and hostile of the young characters wakes up all nice and bright, making you wonder about the therapeutic benefits of a stay as a pod person.

No one has enough personality — a problem that extends to the show itself, which remains a polished and at times generic streaming melodrama. Has the goosebumps itself been stripped away? While Stine mainly focused on middle school-aged kids (they were proxies for his target audience), this new TV version smoothes out older teenage life for the supposed audience of sheltered Disney+ viewers. Seldom has Brooklyn looked so nondescript, so suburban. And although the show has secured directors as varied as Gillian Robespierre (Obvious Child) and Oz Rodriguez (Vampires vs. Bronx), there is little that recognizes their specific contribution. (Only Eduardo Sanchez, one of the filmmakers behind The Blair Witch Projectputs his stamp on the material … primarily because his episode contains long stretches of fake home video footage.)

Goosebumps come to life most when they look like, well, goosebumps. Between scenes of chaste romance, the kids narrowly escape various Roger Corman-grade monsters lifted loosely from Stine’s Scholastic page-turners: a seeping blob, some hungry flora, an exercise-wheel Christine blaring System of a Down’s “Chop Suey! ” as it zigzags madly down the city streets. There’s a surprising amount of blur around the edges of the series, like when Schwimmer digs a hungry bulb out of his arm or turns to reveal a nasty eye surprise. These things are very much in the spirit of the books, which left young readers emboldened by their own courage to keep reading and feel like they got something past mom and dad.

But the monsters that are Stine’s bread and butter have become almost secondary to the show’s equation. They are basically accents on its aspirations for a tamer Riverdale or Stranger Things – a few Halloween scares sandwiched between its mainstream teen drama and the kind of overarching mythology that’s often mistaken for a foolproof shortcut to bingeability. If you liked the first season of the show, there’s no reason to think you won’t like the second: despite the all-new cast and story, it’s more of the same. But regardless of your generation or your familiarity with Stine’s vast library of colorful titles and covers, you deserve more goosebumps than this goosebumps give.