“There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
And so opens USA Network’s enticing new dramatic thriller, Dare Me, based on the novel by Megan Abbott, who also co-produces the series, bringing with it the same dark and poetic tone that she effortlessly captured in its literary counterpart. We are five episodes in, and if you’re not watching, you should be. If you are watching, you agree.
Only Abbott can create a story about the struggle for power within a squad of high school cheerleaders and wrap it into something downright horrifyingly unpredictably good.
We first meet Addy and Beth (played by Herizen Guardiola and Marlo Kelly) in back-to-back scenes that hint at a downward spiral between the two protagonists throughout the series, spiking our interest as we wonder what kind of havoc we’re going to witness, and when. The prophetic opening shows Addy navigating her car at a creeping pace through the suburbs in the dead of night, the suspense set up perfectly by the daunted look on her face as she waits in careening anticipation for whatever is approaching in the blurry backdrop that we can’t quite see. We briefly alternate to muted girls dancing in their towels in a locker room and doing handsprings in perfect unison in the gymnasium, and then back to Addy, who is nervously checking her surroundings while fielding incoming texts from an unrelenting Beth.
The texts suggest conflict, with Beth pleading for attention in her very own Beth kind of way and Addy dismissing her. Cut to two months prior, where Addy and Beth steal beer from a gas station and then bolt to Beth’s bright blue Jeep, from which they tilt their faces toward the sky, enjoying a rush of adrenaline as they speed off and guffaw freely and authentically, driving past a dry cleaner no bigger than a two-car garage and boys entertaining themselves by taking a baseball bat to a box full of junk. Addy and Beth solidify, for us, their relationship as best friends who rule the world.
The mood switches from dreamlike to actualization as we’re abruptly thrown into real-time. Beth is taking her role as captain of the cheerleading squad and cutting the girls down to size as she barely looks up from her phone. She’s a boss for sure, and if we’re to learn anything, it’s that she’ll settle for no less. She scolds the girls for not moving fast enough and quips that Addy will never keep her thigh gap “like that.”
Then pulls in Collette French (Willa Fitzgerald), who’s there to take over the position that Beth has happily filled and gotten used to. Addy marvels from the top of the bleachers as the alchemistic new coach walks fiercely yet unexcitedly through the parking lot below. To look at her, it’s just another day, not the day she enters unfamiliar territory and takes command of an unpredictable group of teenage girls. She knows she’s got this, and Addy can see it.
Still, we see more than Addy is able. Coach’s luminous sunglasses don’t hide the perpetual sadness underneath. Her eyes long for something. Her eyes show an emptiness that her words never will.
And the story begins.
We barely blink before Coach is whipping the girls into shape, working them hard, pushing them to their limits, too easily impressing them with her cutthroat authority. Well, impressing all except Beth, who’s been calling the shots and wants it to stay that way. She wastes no time making that clear when she challenges Coach. But Coach is equally challenging. She doesn’t like entitlement, and she’s not going to put up with a show.
Right there, the conflict is set.
But here we have two very different types of leaders. While Coach and Beth share the ability to command harshly and relentlessly, Coach does it in earnest. She knows that succumbing to mercy doesn’t create winners, and Coach wants her girls to be winners. Beth, on the other hand, enjoys the brutality of the charge, and that’s where her pull for dominance ends.
Addy now finds herself caught between her best friend and the mentor she’s been unknowingly expecting. What’s refreshing about Addy is her passion for cheer. She isn’t soaking up her glory days and expecting to be handed more glory once she cashes those days in. Addy wants more, and not more than cheer, but more from cheer. Addy revels in what cheer can bring, and she’s willing to work for it rather than demand it. She just needs the abrasiveness to show what she’s got instead of lingering on the sidelines when thrown there by her more aggressive friend. And here’s Coach, who doesn’t see Addy as second to Beth. Finally, someone goes against the fray, giving the other girls a chance to earn recognition instead of allowing Beth to own the spotlight just because she always has.
But even with Coach offering some glimmer to Addy’s ambition, which had thus far been collecting dust on the shelf despite Addy’s not-so-confident insistence that she could make it happen, there remains the obstacle of her loyalty towards Beth. Coach seems like the obvious choice; however, we wonder, at times, if Beth’s cruelty really runs as deeply as we’re seeing.
The question surfaces every time we see Beth’s seemingly laughable father (Paul Fitzgerald) and self-involved mother (Tammy Blanchard) affect her in ways that she masks with apathy or scorn, or when we see the hurt that replaces Beth’s usual smug expression the first time Addy abandons her, leaving her to her own devices and giving us insight into her lonely world. With a mother who can’t be bothered and a father who instead dotes over the half-sister (Alison Thornton) that resulted in an extramarital affair, why wouldn’t we wonder if Beth is broken more than she is wicked?
But Coach has her own demons, which are sure to tumble Addy and Beth’s way, setting off a chain reaction they never see coming. If Dare Me isn’t good enough already, it certainly will be. The collision course that’s foreshadowed consistently throughout the first episode takes an explosive leap before the credits roll, and in the episodes to come, events spin so out of control that we gasp to catch our breath. And yet we still can’t look away.
Catch up at usanetwork.com
https://www.usanetwork.com/dare-me
Purchase Megan Abbott’s book through Barnes & Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dare-me-megan-abbott/1106244238?ean=9780316430173#/
Certain Movies & Things 