[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 1 of The Midnight Club.]
Creator Mike Flanagan‘s latest Netflix series The Midnight Club is another turning point for the horror extraordinaire — one that dives deep into 1990s nostalgia.
For starters, it’s Flanagan’s first open-ended series. It hasn’t been renewed yet for a second season, but it easily could be, unlike his limited series The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor and Midnight Mass. “We’ve done so much with limited series in the past, the idea of trying to make a show that would still wrap up in a satisfying way, but could continue, was something that was really tough,” Flanagan admitted to TV Insider during New York Comic Con, alongside fellow executive producers Leah Fong and Trevor Macy.
The Midnight Club is also targeting a younger audience. The series follows a group of young adults in a hospice who struggle with a host of dilemmas from their shortened-life spans, to drug abuse and beyond. And what better way to illustrate that teenage/young adult struggle than the ultimate coming-of-age emo ballad, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day?
“It’s actually, technically, not period appropriate,” Fong notes of the series’s important musical moment, which occurs in Episode 7. “Good Riddance” was released in 1997, but the majority of the drama’s storyline is set in 1994.
But the timing didn’t deter the writers too much. Adds Flanagan: “That song was really important to me in high school and in college. It felt like, thematically, the lyrics of it and hearing a cello version of it, it was irresistible. We went to great efforts to be authentic to the time period and to be exactly right on everything else, and then with that song, we were like ‘to hell with it, we’re going to use it anyway.’”
Check out the full interview above for more from the EPs about “Good Riddance” and what’s on their wishlist for Season 2.
The Midnight Club, Streaming now, Netflix
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