“We wanted to do something with a rawness and deep emotionality, and dark.” As it stealthily veers into mystery, Abbott says she and Fattore looked to how David Lynch riffs on noir, “and the way that he, especially in Twin Peaks, believes that the show should feel how the world feels to the characters. This ruptured friendship, however, goes beyond the angst of coming-of-age stories and becomes a languid crime story filled with dread.

The show is a rarity in how seriously it takes female teenage friendship. “It’s something many young women go through and a critical developmental moment for so many.” Open this photo in gallery: Abbott cites the relationship between Angela and Rayanne in My So-Called Life as a model for the kind of intensity she wanted to explore.

It’s also that rare show that centres, and takes seriously, female friendship – let alone teenage female friendship. Someone with gravitas you could imagine a cult of personality around.” So is the interloper and rival for Addy’s affections: their fierce and magnetic new coach Colette (Willa Fitzgerald) – a “cold, beautiful and demanding” mentor that Abbott likens to a Hitchcock blonde (and indeed, a later episode contains a coiled coif framed as a wink to Vertigo). Australian Marlo Kelly (in a breakout role) was cast as the flinty best friend because she could be “more than the mean girl. So why cheerleaders?ĭare Me follows Addy, the observant lieutenant to charismatic head cheerleader Beth, “though in some ways Addy is a very unreliable narrator – complicated and strange,” Abbott warns. Cain, Chester Himes and Raymond Chandler (literally: she has a PhD in noir literature).Ībbott has written about hysteria and contagion, and about power dynamics in the gymnastics community and among research scientists.

In addition to being a best-selling novelist (most recently with the psychological thriller Give Me Your Hand), Abbott previously worked as a writer and story editor on The Deuce and is an expert on the hardboiled fiction of James M. Abbott herself is also the series’ executive producer, co-creator and co-showrunner along with Gina Fattore. “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls,” she promises in the first episode.īased on Megan Abbott’s 2012 novel, Dare Me is set in the world of competitive high-school cheerleading. In his voice-over narration of Double Indemnity, insurance salesman Walter Neff tells his story in retrospect and ruefully wonders, “How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” The new suspense series Dare Me (now available on Netflix Canada) is likewise recounted by cheerleader and college hopeful Addy (Herizen Guardiola of The Get Down).

Dare Me by Megan Abbott