[This story contains major spoilers from season one of Peacock‘s Hysteria!]
Hysteria! creator Matthew Scott wrote the first script for the series in 2019. He had something to say about “the idea that facts and reality were up for debate,” and worried that if it didn’t get made relatively quickly, that underlying theme would seem out of place.
It took five years for Hysteria! to make it in front of viewers — but if anything, his notion about how people perceive the world around them has only become more relevant.
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“Everyone had their own version of the truth, and I was very uncomfortable with how that was changing. I wanted to tell a story that was in that kind of ballpark,” Kane tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I had been researching the Satanic panic for a long time and felt like these things are a very natural way to talk about each other. So I wanted to do a Satanic panic show that was an allegory for what we’re going through in this current moment. It doesn’t seem like it’s changed all that much since 2019, unfortunately — we’re still very much in the thick of it.”
Hysteria! centers on teenagers Dylan (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis) who are in a metal band called Dethkrunch. When the quarterback of their high school football team disappears — and someone paints a pentagram on his garage door — they decide to adopt a Satanist gimmick for the band. It works too well. The band gets popular, but the fake cult they form with help from some fellow outcasts soon turns a little too real. Like, possibly summoning the actual Satan real, along with revealing some very disturbing traits in Dylan’s crush, Judith (Jessica Treska), and some of the other cool kids at school.
The demonic aspect of the show falls heaviest on Linda (Julie Bowen), Dylan’s mom, who begins feeling — and experiencing — an evil presence around her.
“Is she?” Bowen asks rhetorically. “We got one script at a time, so each time I got a new one I would [think], is this really happening, or is this not happening? And I was never told. So I just played it as much as Linda would feel confused and baffled and scared, because who the hell knows? I had to believe that Linda believes that this is really some sort of possession.”
As it turns out, the quarterback’s disappearance and eventual death is set in motion by Tracy Whitehead (Anna Camp), a fervently religious woman who wants to scare her daughter, Faith (Nikki Hahn), away from sex and hires a cult deprogrammer/criminal known as The Reverend (Garret Dillahunt) — who once exfiltrated her from a hippie commune after she saw the devil during an LSD trip. Faith and the QB, Ryan Hudson (Brandon Butler), were having a makeout session, and so The Reverend’s goons kidnap him too, only to see him die of an asthma attack.
The Reverend orchestrates a cover-up making it look like Satanists abducted and killed Ryan — and Tracy finds scapegoats in both Dethkrunch and Linda, whom she blames for letting evil into her home to pollute Dylan’s soul, further stoking the panic in the town.
“Tracy is a very flawed person, and she begins the season by being devoted to God and serving God,” Camp tells THR. “Later we get to see that Tracy is also into saving herself and saving her daughter, and we see how selfish she can be — but it’s mainly for saving her daughter. She doesn’t want anything bad to ever happen to her, and no matter what the cost is, she doesn’t care. She’ll stop at nothing to protect her daughter, and she says in one episode that she’ll leave it up to God to decide whether what they’re doing is right or wrong.”
Even as the chief of police (Bruce Campbell) closes in on The Reverend, strange things keep happening: The chief gets a phone call on a disconnected line, Linda’s condition deteriorates, and the band members try to clear their names as fear and panic — which physically manifests on people’s skin as reddish-purple blotches — continues to spread.
“This is a story about people making bad decisions; teenagers making bad decisions, and their parents making bad decisions, and that that’s universal as well,” executive producer David A. Goodman says. “[The show] folds that into everything Matt brought into that first script. I didn’t join the project till after Matt had written the pilot, and everything was in there.”
Kane was born in 1990, a year later than the show is set, but he has a vivid childhood memory of going to his first concert — Kiss — and wearing a band T-shirt to school the next day.
“My teacher would not allow me to come into the classroom wearing that shirt because, in her words, Kiss stood for Knights in Satan’s Service,” Kane recalls. “That was my first time really having my eyes opened to, ‘Oh, people are actually afraid of this stuff that feels so innocuous.’ I mean, he’s singing about his love gun, and about rocking and rolling all night. This isn’t evil stuff, but I think that was my first brush with a Satanic panic, and that was the first time that I think I felt a calling to be more invested in this world. It just made it seem cooler and more interesting to me.”
Hysteria! never fully tips its hand as to whether what’s happening is just a panic or whether Satan has actually come to town (though the final shot of the season makes a case for the latter). Kane and Goodman say they’d love continue exploring those ideas in a second season.
“The goal for us would be to follow these characters,” Kane says. “We love Dethkrunch. We feel like there’s a lot of road ahead of them. We think there’s so much road ahead for Linda, Julie Bowen’s character, for Tracy, Anna Camp’s character, and for Chief Dandridge, Bruce Campbell, I think there are diving boards for them to go off and have awesome second, third, fourth seasons.”
Goodman adds, “We also created a family of characters played by these great actors, both the kids and the adults. We don’t want to go away from them. Even though we take the characters to the edge and over the edge in the finale, there’s still plenty of places for them to go. This is the group we would like to to continue with, and we think the audience will too.”
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Hysteria! is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.
