Do teenage American girls see their lives as dark fever dreams of yearning and danger? I couldn’t say, but television would have you think so. It’s the vision offered by HBO’s popular series “Euphoria,” and also by the show “Euphoria” reportedly beat out for a spot on HBO’s roster. That show, “Dare Me,” ended up at USA, and the 10-episode season that begins Sunday — sexier and more mysterious than the sometimes glibly nihilistic “Euphoria” — shows that first choice isn’t always best.

Based on a novel by Megan Abbott, who developed the series with the producer Gina Fattore, “Dare Me” combines a teenage melodrama with a murder mystery, though in uneven proportions — the violent death that’s teased in quick shots of pooling blood doesn’t happen until late in the season. (Although it’s adapted from a stand-alone novel, “Dare Me” is intended to be a continuing series.)

And there’s a third, more unusual, element in the mix: a rousing sports drama. The central characters are the members of a formerly mediocre high school cheerleading squad and the new coach who wants to make them competitive. She succeeds, in more ways than she expects.

The looming mystery may be the prize that makes you buy in, but the heart of “Dare Me” is its immersion in the lives of its young characters — bored, hungry, bouncing off the walls, hemmed in by life in a fading Rust Belt town. The show glides in a buzzing, trance-like way from school corridors to nighttime streets to bleak apartment blocks, landing at an anonymous motel for a freighted scene in which the search for the next party brings the girls together with the young military recruiters they see every day at school.