Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1260764
6 6 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 0 A hen I was first sent the pilot script for Dare Me, I was sure that I wouldn't like it. And yet, as I scratched the surface, my own presumptions and prejudices were uickly revealed. I've never been so glad to be so wrong. This was a visceral, tearing, iddle America mystery that inverted every expectation of what it meant to be a high school cheerleader. There were no stereotypes here. The characters in egan Abbott's Dare Me look back at the reader, suare in the face. I uickly devoured the book on which the series was based and connected immediately with two aspects of egan's visual storytellingher descriptions of the deteriorating Sutton Grove and her unflinching "We had so many great conversations about the Rust Belt—how rarely and how inaccurately it's portrayed on screen. That faded palette, the rotting industrial shimmer, the white skies. All these hometowns that aren't a bustling suburb nor a rural small town. Instead, Sutton Grove is one of those thousands of former "company towns" that are slowly fading away—a ghost of industry past. The kind of place where parking lots, 7-Elevens, shuttered factories are where teens have all their seminal experiences." Megan Abbott, author and showrunner of Dare e. portrayal of the high-flying women, each with their own facades, cracks and lies. There was texture on every page and the story provided so much depth for meaningful, thematic and richly dark production design. The Town Although the pilot wasn't explicit about it, for me, Sutton Grove felt like the idwesta once promising manufacturing hub that industry had abandoned, leaving scars and broken promises on every street corner. I knew this place. I grew up in the idwest, and I was excited to learn that both showrunners egan Abbott and Gina Fattore also had history there. I think we shared a lovehate understanding of the placea desire to escape, and then, as soon as you get out, a pining nostalgia to return. ost importantly, we wanted Sutton Grove to feel like a familiar place with real stakes. This uglybeautiful contradiction is one of my favorite things about the idwest, the toobright fluorescent almart next to a decaying downtown. assive power lines cutting through the landscape. And as egan mentioned, we wanted to feel the loss of Sutton Grove's former industrial heyday. A. THIS HIGH SCHOOL WAS CHOSEN BECAUSE IT LOOKED LIKE A FACTORY AND BECAUSE IT HAS A 1960S OPTIMISM THAT NOW FEELS WORN OUT AND LEFT BEHIND. PRODUCTION STILL. B. THE COLOR PALETTE AS WE GET CLOSER TO THE GIRLS—ACID GREENS, BURNT ORANGES AND DIRTY MAGENTAS. EVEN THE STRIPES IN THE BACKGROUND WERE ADDED—THE BLUE AND BURGUNDY OF THE TOWN AND SCHOOL. PRODUCTION STILL. G L Y E A T I F L T H E V I S U A L L A N G U A G E O F D A R E M E B Y M I C H A E L B R I C K E R , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R .