Dare Me - When teen drama goes to the dark side
Troubled teens and competitive cheerleading meet murder mystery in Netflix’s Dare Me - but how do film noir themes translate to teen drama?
Forget the sunlit school days of Dawson’s Creek and the supernatural swooning of the Vampire Diaries; the latest team dramas are more likely to take their cues from film noir than fluffy rom-com. You only have to watch a recent episode of Riverdale to see that classroom conflicts have been replaced by cults, mob wars, and hunting for serial killers. And it’s not just the teen dramas that have been taking notes from noir; Netflix’s What If caused waves in 2019 with its camp sensibility, plot lines reaching ever-increasing levels of insanity, and a brilliantly unhinged central performance by Renee Zellweger.
While adult drama has often taken inspiration from film noir, it’s not been embraced by teen TV on the same scale - until now. And it’s a natural fit. After all, everything feels like life and death for a teen. Raging hormones, identity crises, exam pressure and friendship fallouts - the daily lives of teens are always dramatic. It’s easy to see why TV writers would be tempted to throw a murder, and all of the guilt, deception, and suspicion that comes with it, into these already charged environments.
Dare Me is a teen drama drawn to the dark side. Set in the world of competitive cheerleading, the series follows best friends Beth and Addy as their relationship is tested by outside influences - boys, drugs, dysfunctional family dynamics and, most importantly, the arrival of new cheer coach, Colette French.
Throughout its well-paced 10 episodes (a slow burn that stays just on the right side of satisfying), Dare Me stays in the shadows. It showcases teenagers at their most cruel with clique power plays, bullying, and backstabbing a part of everyday life. Throw in the competitive nature of the cheer squad, a fractured friendship between two codependent teens, and glamorous ice queen Colette fanning the flames of both, and it becomes a pressure cooker poised and ready to explode.
There’s a lot to like about Dare Me - and not just because it’s the perfect blend of two of 2020’s biggest hits; Cheer and Euphoria. TV doesn’t choose to tackle the complexities of female friendship enough, especially teen TV. It’s so much easier to follow familiar romantic themes with any conflicts between friends inevitably caused by a shared love interest. Dare Me follows the pattern of a third-party causing problems between Beth and Addy - in this case, the new coach Colette - but it’s clearly the final crack in a relationship that was already severely fractured.
The show takes time to explain why Beth and Addy are the way they are, and why their similarities - broken families, competitive natures and hedonistic tendencies - are the things that drew them together and are now driving them apart. Beth could easily be painted as a villain; encouraging Addy to break the rules, bullying her half-sister (with almost deadly consequences), and acting the Queen Bee but instead, the show gives every character light and shade. We might not always like her, but it’s easy to understand why Beth acts the way she does - even when we wish she wouldn’t!
The adult characters are less nuanced. Willa Fitzgerald’s Colette French is a high point, a mysterious, charismatic, and deeply flawed role model. It’s difficult to tell when her tough love approach crosses the line into outright bullying. Her resentment at being forced to take on a position that she considers beneath her, being the star without outshining her husband, and the claustrophobic feeling of moving back to your home town make her marital problems understandable. That is, until she starts dragging Addy into her web of lies.
Unfortunately, Dare Me’s parents aren’t as well drawn. Beth’s dad is the stereotypical absent father, trying to make up for his failings by throwing money and misguided enthusiasm at his girls (and ramping up their already competitive natures). Her mother - broken by her divorce - spends the majority of the season either asleep off-screen or in a drug-induced haze. Addy’s single mother - a police officer - is a better parent but she’s also conspicuously absent, her job meaning that Addy can get away with anything and everything.
None of the usual consequences apply to the teens in Dare Me. The girls can stay out all night, have wild house parties, physically harm one another, and leave home in the early hours of the morning to help cover up a murder, without any parental or academic intervention. It makes sense for the plot - there’s no need to pause while someone’s grounded or in detention, but it does lead the series to lose its grip on reality, which in turn dilutes the drama.
So, does the darkness work for this teen drama? Dare Me hits all the film noir notes. The dark and gloomy cinematography, the central murder mystery, themes of deception, competitiveness, moral corruption, disenchantment and guilt. And the characters are engaging, despite their flaws. All three leads - Willa Fitzgerald, Herizen Guardiola and Marlo Kelly - pull you in and force you to empathise with them, even when you shouldn’t. But can it sustain the drama for a second season? It’s a tough balance to maintain - a pulpy sensationalist drama that doesn’t go off the rails and leave reality behind completely. The strong debut season gives me hope but I’ll be disappointed if it does waste it’s early promise and fall into full camp like What If.
After almost thirty years of teen drama, we’ve seen almost every trope play out: love triangles, academic struggles, family breakdowns, addiction - why shouldn’t murder be thrown into the mix? But shows like Riverdale should serve as a cautionary tale for Dare Me and other teen dramas tempted to go noir. The Archie Comics-inspired series won fans for focusing on the mysteries, keeping school and relationship drama to a minimum. But four seasons on, the mystery plots have got more and more outlandish and the stakes are lower. It’s hard to emotional invest in plot lines that would be more at home on American Horror Story. Now, the introduction of a controversial love square - a teen drama staple - has caused uproar among the Riverdale fanbase and made it a must-see show for the first time in two years. The lesson for Dare Me? Dark teen drama can be great, exciting, complex, and emotionally charged but only as long it keeps one foot in the classroom.