Buttery Yellow & Nantucket Red: Crafting the Color of Wealth in Netflix’s Sirens

Jun 25, 2025

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How Creator/Writer Molly Smith Metzler, Cinematographer Greg Middleton, Harbor Colorist Andrea Leigh Chlebak, and Costume Designer Caroline Duncan, meticulously crafted an über-wealthy world in the Netflix’s limited series, Sirens, starring Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Meghann Fahy, Milly Alcock, and more.

By: Ellie Powers

Molly Smith Metzler boards a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. She’s just graduated from college and is off to a summer job, unaware she’s about to step into a reality she never knew existed—that of the top 1% of the 1%.

That fateful summer inspired Elemeno Pea, a play Metzler wrote about her experiences observing wealth and power, especially amongst women. That play would later become her writing sample, landing her positions in writers’ rooms for shows like Orange is the New Black and Shameless (US)

Eleven years after Elemeno Pea premiered, Metzler adapted it into a Netflix series titled Sirens. “The play is an hour and a half long,” she explains over Zoom. “It all happens in one room with five characters, while the show is an entire weekend and almost 300 minutes long. I finally got the chance to bring to life all these characters we only hear about in the play.”

Perhaps the most notable of these characters is the husband, Peter, played by Kevin Bacon. “Peter is just as complicated as everyone else in this show,” Metzler says. “Even though he holds the most power, he tries to diffuse it, to make everyone forget how powerful he is. Peter had to be in the show because Sirens is about class and power, and how women move through that world.”

The women in Sirens hold varying degrees of connection to this elite sphere. Most insular is Peter’s (second) wife, Michaela (or Kiki) played by Julianne Moore, who carries a cult-leader aura. Her assistant, Simone, played by Milly Alcock, comes from a middle-class background but aspires to Michaela’s life. And then there’s Devon, portrayed by Meghann Fahy, an outsider and the audience’s proxy. She boards a ferry, much like Metzler once did, searching for her sister, whom she hasn’t heard from in a while. Devon, though occasionally seduced by this luxurious world, remains the story’s skeptic.

Through these three women, Molly, alongside directors Nicole Kassell, Quyen Tran, and Lila Neugebauer, examines how power trickles down, evolves, and manipulates those within its orbit.

While writing Sirens, Metzler carefully managed tone, ensuring the show avoided fully committing to any one genre. “We were finding the places where comedy and drama can dance together, but never tip too far into mystery. We never fully land in satire, we never tip into pure drama, and we don’t go broad with the comedy. We live in the epicenter of all those things, which is hard to do.”

For that reason, Molly is confident you’ve never seen a series like Sirens. Which also means the show couldn’t look like anything else you’ve seen. That gave cinematographers Greg Middleton and Zoë White, and colorist Andrea Leigh Chlebak, a unique challenge. On top of that, the team had to differentiate between two worlds that contrast each other starkly without taking the viewer out of the story.

The story begins in Buffalo, New York, where Devon contends with her father’s declining health and her own unraveling life. This world is grey, brown, muddy, and often shot from low angles. Take the opening shot: Devon sits on the curb outside a police precinct, the camera framing her from even further down. It’s overcast, dirty, and she looks exhausted.

By contrast, the island world she enters is vibrant, blindingly colorful, a modern-day Oz. Molly describes it as “a little too saturated; everything is sparkling. It’s not eggshell white. It’s sparkling white. There’s a pristine precision to the colors, and they’re blinding on purpose. We wanted it to feel larger than life, better than life, but also real.”

Andrea remarks that while she pulled reference shots, none of them fully fit what they were looking to achieve. For example, they looked at frames from Edward Scissorhands for inspiration to create a fantasy world, but those reference frames had more of a ’50s lean to the pastels. “We liked that,” she says. “But then we thought, this is modern day. We don't want it to feel like it's like Dharma Collective or transcending time.” In the end, they focused more on “allowing the production design to guide us.” In that sense, it was a more intellectual and intuitive process, focusing on nailing the colors instead of trying to emulate a reference.

A standout touchstone for Molly was Nantucket red, a salmony-red hue (neither pink nor fully red). Andrea used this color to calibrate the broader palette, adjusting lighting and overall look to make sure this precise shade registered correctly, which in turn brought other colors into harmony.

Costume design also played a key role in establishing a visual language. Caroline Duncan curated a wardrobe of Easter pastels, and the team was strict about which hues made the cut. “Only certain shades of yellow would work,” she says. “If they were too Tweety Bird, they didn’t make it in. It had to be a soft Easter yellow. It was something we really policed.” Whereas for Michaela, whose true intentions are difficult to identify, she’s often dressed in long, flowy white (not off-white, white white)

The colors of Sirens aren’t just aesthetic; they reflect the intoxicating, sometimes dangerous fantasy of extreme wealth. “I realized there’s a little bit of a trap and a sadness to that life,” Metzler observes.

Against bright whites, buttery yellows, loud prints, and crystal-clear blue waves, Sirens examines relationships, trauma, and class through a sharper, more empathetic lens than its stage predecessor. “When I was studying these women, I was innocent,” Metzler reflects. “Now I have more experience. Your point of view changes. I have a lot more empathy for everyone in the show.”

She points out that the power women hold in this world is often conditional and ephemeral. “At some of these yacht clubs and golf courses, when a couple divorces, the membership stays with the husband.”

Oh, and Molly’s thoughts on sirens? She wonders, “Maybe they were just singing.”

“Maybe it was the sailors’ fault,” I suggest.

She grins and says, in a dramatic stage whisper, “I definitely think it’s the sailors’ fault.”

The only remaining question: what did the sirens think of Nantucket red?