Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This opens on a blood-splattered heroine pacing the lonely streets of her rust belt town. Almost immediately we learn that she is Sydney (Sophia Lillis), a charmingly caustic teen struggling to cope with grief, crushes, and the overwhelming weight of having the power to hurt people with her mind.

I Am Not Okay With This is exactly the kind of twisted superhero story you’d expect from Jonathan Entwistle, the British director behind Netflix’s raucous hit, The End of the F***ing World. Joining forces with the production team behind Stranger Things, Entwistle is mixing dark wit, darker supernatural forces, and the breezy cool of John Hughes together for a truly addicting treat.

“Usually, in superhero stuff or super-powered stuff the person gets bitten by a spider or something and they’re like, ‘Holy fuck, I’m a superhero now! Yes!'” Entwistle told a roundtable of reporters at a set visit in summer 2019. “We just wanted to do something where she’s just like, ‘Oh man, I’m not okay with being a superhero.'”

Sydney is a complex part, full of dry wit, vulnerability, and an irreverent take on the world. So the series needed to find a young actress with the poise and depth to carry audiences through the dark and light poles of Sydney’s experience. Enter Sophia Lillis, the breakout star of It.

Slouching in a production office chair last summer, Lillis told reporters, “Well, I loved End of the F***ing World. I loved that series quite a bit. And now the same director is doing a series off a book from the same author, and I thought, ‘Well, I want to be a part of this!'”

Like End of the F***ing World, I Am Not Okay With This is based on a graphic novel from indie artist Charles Forsman. Entwistle and Forsman have formed a unique collaborative bond over the years, with Forsman sharing additional unpublished ideas with the director and Entwistle brilliantly translating Forsman’s monochromatic style into vivid technicolor.

“When I first found End of the F***ing World, the first thing I found when I picked up the book was it was just super cinematic. It’s literally just big frames that look like stills from movies,” Entwistle said. “There is so much great imagery in comics, but there is often not great storytelling. And he managed to do something in a white box with someone’s head, which had so much story in it, that for me it was the first time I’d seen anything that was like that. And that kind of set the ball rolling for what is now a collaboration.”

The graphic novel I Am Not Okay With This is hauntingly dark, focusing on the innermost thoughts of Sydney as she tries to understand her powers along with her grief, loneliness, anger, sexuality, and mental illness. The story features some extremely adult themes and even ends with Sydney taking her own life after using her powers to murder someone. Entwistle was adamant that the Netflix series would not be this macabre, and indeed, would be more expansive.

“Chuck wrote a story about mental illness, and essentially suicide, and what we did is we took all of the things that drive the character there and expanded the world,” he said. “What I wanted to do was try and find a way to take all of the elements of a journey of somebody being confused by lots of different things in their life and try and make a different type of genre show. So it’s not necessarily a kind of indie movie version of a superhero show, it’s more like a superhero show done differently.”

Throughout the set visit, creatives from behind the camera and the stars themselves kept explaining that the tone was something that combined Forsman’s depth with John Hughes’s comedic take on teenaged angst. Sophia Bryant, who plays Sydney’s best friend Dina, said, “It kind of gives the vibe of like a Lady Bird meets X-Men, which is super, super cool.”

Indeed, John Hughes seemed to be the one artist who got name-checked more than Forsman on set, with Wyatt Oleff, who plays Sydney’s friend Stanley, revealing that Duckie from Pretty in Pink was a big inspiration for his character. “Obviously I don’t want to copy the character directly, but basing it off of that, and having that quirky sense of weird that is kind of cool is really fun to channel,” Oleff shared.

Part of adapting Forsman’s work meant rooting it in a location that would make sense. The setting was key, and Entwistle fell in love with the untouched steel town of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, a forgotten suburb of Pittsburgh. The show is set there in order to lend I Am Not Okay With This the feel of a “kind of rust belt superhero show.”

“I don’t need to rewrite the whole wheel of superheroes, but just simply putting someone not walking down a suburban street, putting them in a kind of row houses or by a river with a thousand bridges going down the river just immediately kind of changes the aesthetic completely,” Entwistle said. “I’ve seen blue collar, but I’ve seen Detroit or I’ve seen Brooklyn or I’ve seen Hell’s Kitchen. I’ve seen it done like that way before, but I’ve never seen rural, semi-suburban, steel town superheroes, I don’t think.”

Pittsburgh wound up influencing the aesthetic of I Am Not Okay With This in a huge way. Production designer Maya Sigel shared that although she and Director of Photography Justin Davis shared photos as points of inspiration, it was after they visited Brownsville that the look and feel of the series really took off. The palate features faded blues, somber corals, and shades of brown. Actress Kathleen Rose Perkins, who plays Sydney’s mother, said, “All the colors are very autumnal and the brown is pervasive. It’s set in Brownsville, Pennsylvannia!”

The show’s setting also helps ground it in reality, which was incredibly important to Entwistle. He wanted the reality of being a teenager to butt up against Sydney’s emerging superpowers. “I call it ‘the Teen Wolf Effect,’ which is where you have superpowers in the most inopportune moments,” Entwistle shared. “She kind of has a crush on this guy. She also has a crush on her best friend. She has no idea why she has these crushes, and the really annoying thing is that she has superpowers. And that to me is how the superpowers work in the show. Very much for us Season 1 is about, ‘Oh my God, I got to get to math class, but I can’t because I just blew down a wall.'”

Entwistle also shared that since I Am Not Okay With This is designed as an ongoing series, the show would use supplemental material Forsman omitted from the original graphic novel. “There is, without going into too much detail, a much bigger, under-the-surface conspiracy if you will that goes back much further to do with the powers that will then come to light for the subsequent seasons,” Forsman said.

Set in small town America and featuring a young woman with superpowers, I Am Not Okay With This has a lot in common with another one of Netflix’s major hits, and Entwistle wasn’t bothered by the Stranger Things comparisons. In fact, he loved them.

“I joke with Sophia the whole time about like what do we copy from Stranger Things as a kind of joke because it’s always going to be a reference because there are similar people in the world. And I think that, in a way, there’s a lot of fun to be had with that,” Entwistle said. “If anything it makes I Am Not Okay With This stand out as a kind of, almost like a janky, indie version of superpowers.”

Entwistle added: “I’d love for it to be like the ugly sister to Stranger Things. That would be brilliant.”

I Am Not Okay With This premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, February 26.

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