Dare Me

When the main source of drama is unclear intentions or mixed signals, “Dare Me” wears its hazy, dreamlike exterior well. As the season progresses and those nightmares become a little more literal, the cuts between hallucinations and reality become slightly less effective. But when that disorienting, who-to-believe framework gets reflected from multiple angles, “Dare Me” truly delivers.

A smart and soapy noir work about the tensions between teenage girls, as well as an adult coach who still behaves like a teenage girl.

A wicked thriller that practically demands that its audience gorge upon it. It’s lush and seductive, a fact that it’s both aware of and uses to chilling effect.

A worthwhile time investment for midseason, offering something more venturesome than your standard good time with bad people. It's a safari tour among commonplace predators so accustomed to feasting on readily available prey that they don't catch the scent of a fresh danger before it closes in.

It’s a sharp character portrait and a dreamy mood piece, one style inflecting the other.

Dare Me features a tantalizing blend of guilty-pleasure trashiness, smart genre deconstruction and unfiltered, darkly comic adrenaline. ... Think Wild Things, only less exploitative. Or just think a classed-up neo-noir, veering into Hitchcock.

Having foreshadowed the mystery to come, the show spends much of the season presenting us with suspects for a crime that hasn’t happened yet, and that isn’t always an exciting process ... The show generally succeeds, though, in approximating the dreamlike quality of the book.

What there is of a plot ... unfolds very, very slowly, suggesting the show would have done better with either a shorter season or as a miniseries. ... Still, great atmosphere and lived-in performances (especially from Kelly and Guardiola) carry this show a hell of a way farther down the field than a lot of recent dramatic slogs with similarly unbalanced story-to-episode ratios.

It’s brilliantly acted and a fascinating, incredibly fraught thing to watch, especially as the numerous female directors film their interactions with a strange, deep kind of intimacy that borders on sexual – and again feels very familiar to anyone who had a toxic but exhilarating relationship with their female friends when they were young. ... It is, in places, very overwrought, wanting to impress upon its viewer just how young, powerful and hedonistic the girls really are, but there’s only so many slow-motion shots of them swigging alcohol from the bottle while streetlights play over their laughing faces a viewer can take before it gets a bit ridiculous.

Dare Me is long on atmosphere, short on plot, and distressingly overburdened with anachronistic dialogue.