Wayward, Netflix's newest thriller series about a teen academy with dark secrets, was inspired by a childhood friend of creator Mae Martin. The comedian revealed the connection at an intimate screening in Los Angeles on Saturday. Abbi Jacobson, Clea DuVall, Natalie Morales, Bobby Berk, and Atsuko Okatsuka were just a few of Martin's friends who attended alongside series star Sarah Gadon. Before screening episodes 1 and 2, Martin talked about the show, which has been in development for six years, being "very personal.""I have been thinking about it since I was a teenager," they said. "My best friend when I was 16, she was a stoner, not in need of any radical intervention, and she was sent to a troubled teen institute. She was gone for two years and ended up escaping and hitchhiking. The stories that she had about her time there were so crazy, so I've always been interested in that industry." Wayward follows two "troubled" best friends, Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), who get shipped off to Tall Pines Academy an institute run by a spiritual yet controlling director (Toni Collette) whose rehabilitation techniques are, let's say, unconventional. The town's secrets start bubbling to the surface when a sharp-eyed cop named Alex (Mae Martin) moves to town with his pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon), and things quickly get bloody. While Alex is on the case, the codependent besties delve deeper into the underbelly of the school greatly reducing their chances of escaping unscathed. The series really takes time to focus on the relationship between Abbie and Leila, and both of their toxic relationships with their families, which Martin addressed at the screening. They explained that they feel "strongly about how we pathologize young people when they might be just reacting to a sick world and how those labels that we give them affect the way they view their own potential." And they described the show as being about "the world that we're handing to the next generation," in addition to intergenerational trauma."As we get older, I feel like we have to suppress so much of our empathy, or critical thinking, just to participate in the world and the systems that govern the world," Martin said. "I feel protective of young people. I feel like we should listen to them, and also we should tap into our inner rebellious teenagers. We're gonna have to, I think, in order to have the kind of conviction and imagination that we need to imagine a different world."Wayward premieres on Netflix on September 25. - YouTube www.youtube.com