‘Sirens’ Creator Breaks Down the Biggest Change Between the Netflix Show and Her Original Play: “It’s Kevin Bacon”

The new Netflix show Sirens might initially feel very familiar to you. After all, it stars Meghann Fahy, most famous for her work on sumptuous social satires like The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple. It takes place at a gorgeous estate in the vaunted community of Martha’s Vineyard. The show’s cast is absolutely stacked with stars like Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Glenn Howerton, and Milly Alcock. Oh, and there’s this overall feeling of dread in the air, despite the opulent fashions and cutting jokes about the class divide.

Obviously, Sirens is the latest show in the vein of Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and a bevy of other soapy mysteries based on books about rich people, right?

Well, sort of.

The new Netflix show Sirens follows blue collar Buffalo native Devon DeWitt (Meghann Fahy) as she travels to Martha’s Vineyard to confront her long-absent sister Simone (Milly Alcock). Instead of helping Devon care for their ailing father, Simone is working as the personal assistant to mega-rich Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore). Devon’s appearance threatens to upend Simone’s carefully constructed new reality. The sisters bicker, banter, and dredge up trauma.

So is Sirens based on a book? How does Sirens diverge from its source material? And why were so many changes made? Here’s everything you need to know about the original inspiration for the Sirens show, Elemeno Pea…

Photo: Netflix

Is The New Netflix Show Sirens Based on a Book?

No! Unlike similarly satiric shows like The Perfect Couple or Nine Perfect Strangers, Sirens is not based on a book.

That said, it is based on a play.

The foundations of Sirens‘s story comes from series creator Molly Smith Meltzer’s play, Elemeno Pea. You can purchase the play to read on your own.

What Does “Elemeno Pea” Mean? How Different is the Netflix Show Sirens from the Source Material?

Per a review of a 2017 Boston production of Elemeno Pea, the play’s unique title refers to a character misinterpreting the middle of the English language alphabet. “Elemeno Pea” is supposed to actually be “L, M, N, O, P.”

“So the play, I wrote 15 years ago, and it’s five characters in one room, 90 minutes long, and the five characters are Michaela, Simone, Devon, Ethan, and Jose. So those five characters definitely are in the show as major characters, ” Sirens creator Molly Smith Meltzer told DECIDER.

The play deals with Devon visiting her sister Simone at her plush Martha’s Vineyard gig while Simone’s bosses are supposed to be out of town. Michaela crashes the girls’ weekend, however, after her husband announces plans to divorce her.

Photo: Netflix

“It was really great to adapt something I wrote instead of like when I did Maid, I was adapting this award-winning beautiful piece of literature and I felt very beholden to it and I wanted to honor it,” Smith Meltzer said. “When you’ve written the IP, it’s great. You can just throw it away. You’re not precious about it at all.”

“So I was really excited to expand the world and now we have a five hour miniseries so there’s a lot of new stories and just a lot more depth.”

Smith Meltzer explained that by expanding the world of Elemeno Pea into Sirens, she was able to follow the characters over the course of a whole weekend, delving into their backstories, and introducing figures otherwise only referenced.

“The biggest change, which is also the one I’m most excited about, is in the play, we hear about Peter Kell. We understand how much power he has. Everyone’s afraid, because he’s coming, but you never meet him,” Smith Meltzer said. “And in Sirens, of course, he has a huge role, and it’s Kevin Bacon.”

“The reason he’s perfectly cast is he’s so disarmingly nice and he seems working class. He’s doing his clams and drinking his beer, and you forget how powerful he is,” she said. “I love that about him because at the end, of course, he is the most powerful by a lot.”

At the end of Sirens, Peter Kell is not only the most powerful figure, but he’s also the nexus of a lot of the drama. A role he doesn’t necessarily play in Elemeno Pea.

Sirens is now streaming on Netflix.