Taken as a teen drama, Dare Me is already comfortably above-average. She’s like 28,” Beth observes - who initially inspires and rapidly becomes a subject of fascination and then obsession for her young charges. Adding to that aspiration is the arrival of a new cheer coach (Willa Fitzgerald’s Colette French) - “She’s ancient. They’re inseparable, verging on co-dependent, and approaching their senior year in a haze of drinking, drug use and casual sex, with hopes of breaking through and making Regionals. Beth (Marlo Kelly), rebellious daughter of a pillhead (Tammy Blanchard) and a prominent local sports booster (Paul Fitzgerald), and Addy (Herizen Guardiola), daughter of a local cop (Amanda Brugel), are cheerleaders at Sutton Grove High School in nowhere-in-particular, Ohio. The reductive synopsis of Dare Me will probably only lure a percentage of that audience. With a promising young cast, consistently confident direction and enough unexpected developments to fuel much (but not close to all) of its 10-episode first season, the series has things for a wide swathe of viewers to enjoy, provided they find it and approach it on its particular terms. I don’t think the ideal audience for this Megan Abbott adaptation is necessarily watching USA, nor is a buried end-of-year premiere date the best time to be finding that audience (or any audience), but Dare Me features a tantalizing blend of guilty-pleasure trashiness, smart genre deconstruction and unfiltered, darkly comic adrenaline. If you’re looking for the new You - at the same time as the original You is returning for another season now as a Netflix original - you could do far worse than USA’s cheerleading thriller Dare Me. Timing and location still matter on the small screen. Then You moved over to its second-window life on Netflix and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. When Lifetime premiered the twisty stalker dramedy You last fall, it received largely positive reviews, but barely made a cultural ripple.

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