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(Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Go back to the JV squad if you dont want to have the show ruined for you.)
We so wanted to get inside that marriage.
We had to hide it for so long.
What happened in the alternate ending?
Now we have both surprises at the end.
How did you decide which one to go with?Everyone liked both endings, weirdly.
We tried to fuse them somehow, but it didnt work.
And this ultimately seemed so true to the move toward noir as the seasons gone on.
Its only gotten darker and darker and more criminal.
Things did get very dark.
I have teeth things in several of my books.
I dont know what my thing with teeth is, but it became contagious in the writers room.
Teeth kept emerging, and our special-effects guys had so much fun.
That felt like enough for us.
We really wanted things to get more and more dreamlike, too, as the season went out.
This had a slightly surreal feeling.
I became really interested in this triangle with a young woman figuring herself out.
She has these two powerful women, her best friend and her coach, that are fighting for dominance.
Cheer was so perfect for that, of course, because it is so full of risk.
You need each other, but you’re free to also destroy each other.
I really love that triangle between Addy and Beth and Coach French.
Having read the book, it rang pretty true to the source material.
2012 [when the development process started] was a different world in a number of ways.
There was a lot of doubt that was something even worth having a show about.
Thats not the world of most of us at that age; things are murky.
Youre figuring yourself out.
Its changing and fluid.
Its hard to dramatize.
You have to count on the audience to pause in that way with you.
It was posed as if there were no relationships on the show, so lets create one.
And we were so confused, because its all romantic triangles at the center.
There was this kind of blindness to it.
You would think it would be about making her straight somehow, but it was never that.
It was about not seeing what was, to us, the center of the show.
I was a high-school newspaper girl.
Cheer was quite different then, in the late 80s.
I would actually be less inclined to do it now because Ive never had any athletic ability.
Thats my fascination with it.
I marvel at the control over the body and the risk-taking.
Have you watchedCheeron Netflix?Yes!
It was such a thrill, I have to say.
The pop-culture representations of cheer, while often quite fun, never really explored it before.
And onCheer, of course, she wears those boots!
I felt so gratified wed kept it in there.
The coach needs to separate herself [from the team]; shes not one of them.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
