Haley Z. Boston says her life changed the moment the greenlight call came in, and she did not stop working for two years after that. By the time Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen reached Netflix a little over two months before the interview, the horror limited series had already become a calling card for the Northwestern writer behind it.
Boston and Isaac Sims spoke with The Daily in May, after the show’s release and while viewers were still trying to piece together the shape of the story. The series, executively produced by Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, follows betrothed couple Rachel and Nicky in the days leading up to their wedding, and Boston said she was drawn to the chance to build a story that would keep audiences guessing without cheating them.
That balance was the point. Boston said she wanted the endings to surprise viewers, but also to land in a way that felt earned when looked at again. In her telling, the best twist does not just shock on first watch; it feels, in retrospect, as though it was there all along. She described that instinct as part of the fun of writing, saying she is always trying to set up one expectation, then turn it into something else at the last second.
The show’s identity was also shaped by Boston’s own Northwestern roots. The Communication ’16 graduate said she wanted to be part of the pattern of homages to Northwestern that pop up in film and television, and that instinct carried into the series’ cameos and campus references. Sims, a Communication ’17 alum, said the writer’s room had an unusually broad mix of experience, including people who were, in his words, “baked and born into the horror universe.” He said there was also a running joke in the room: “What would Damon Lindelof do?”
That inside-baseball energy helps explain why the show’s twists feel engineered rather than random. Boston and Sims were talking in May, more than two months after the Netflix launch, when the question was no longer just what happened in the series but how it had been built to happen that way. Boston did not name how many Northwestern cameos made the cut, which leaves one part of the show’s campus thread unresolved even as its larger design is clear: the surprises were meant to land hard first, then make perfect sense later.
