Peacock’s ‘Hysteria!’ set in Michigan during 1980s satanic panic

Julie Bowen in a scene from ‘Hysteria!’ This series occurs in Michigan circa the 1980s during the satanic panic. For ‘Hysteria!’ actresses Anna Camp and Julie Bowen, horror is harder than comedy.
‘Something on my mind a lot in 2019 was we’re living in this post-factual age with social media. It seemed like decades and decades ago, you could trust the news. Now everything is in question. When lies end up getting disseminated as truth, that starts to warp people’s version of reality. Suddenly, they’re living in a world other people are not. That was going on in the world I was living in and I very quickly connected it to the 1980s satanic panic.
‘Linda seems like one thing, then you realize she’s bananas. She’s either bananas or she’s possessed. Either way, it’s a complicated thing to play,’ Bowen said. Added Bowen: ‘I got this script and was like, ‘Oh great. She’s a mom. How fun.’ I love moms. I’m a mom, but I felt this was not worth flying out of town to Georgia and being away from my kids. Then I got to the end of the pilot and was like, ‘She’s crazy!’ Is she possessed? There’s a lot more questions. It’s fun to just stretch again and do things I haven’t done in a while, which I found really exciting.”She was the first adult actor to sign on.
‘You write what you know. I grew up in Ypsilanti, so that had a lot to do with it. More importantly, when you’re in a small town in the Midwest — somewhere like Michigan — these things don’t ever happen and word spreads fast and paranoia spreads quickly and blown out of proportion and takes up a lot of people’s minds,’ he said. ‘Whether or not something is real doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there are people willing to believe it does and willing it into the world.