On the first day of September, MTV aired the season finale of the first season of Scream, and now here at the end of the month FOX has launched Scream Queens, packaging the show’s first two episodes and selling them as a two-hour event. Beyond their proximity to one another on the release calendar and clear love of the word “Scream,” the common denominator between the shows is that they both aim to do the unthinkable: Turn a slasher movie into a TV show, with MTV specifically appropriating the Scream franchise and Fox enlisting Ryan Murphy to do his American Horror Story thing for the entire slasher genre in general. At this point, I have seen the first four episodes of Scream (the entire first season is still up on Hulu) and the first two of Scream Queens, and somewhat to my surprise I massively prefer Scream.
Noah, Emma and Audrey in Scream
Let’s start with Scream. As the show’s co-showrunner Jill Blotevogel told THR, “The tone and structure is really the only connection [between the film and the show] right now.” In the world of the Scream TV series, Sydney Prescott, Dewey Riley and Gail Weathers do not exist, although one assumes Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox probably do (albeit without ever having starred in a series of movies all called Scream). Furthermore, the signature Ghostface mask from the films has been replaced with a new mask with a more personal connection to the story. Even the town name has been changed, from Woodsboro to Lakewood.
Blotevogel is right, though – the tone and the structure should be familiar to fans of the movies, with some new modern wrinkles, “What’s fun is while the original would reference horror movies, we’re able to reference horror on TV [e.g., Bates Motel, Hannibal, American Horror Story], which is another level we get to go to. It’s taking what Scream did so well, updating it for 2015 — technology was part of what the killer used then and now we have so much more technology that’s creepy, invasive and stalker-friendly.”
The utilization of modern technology is all over the show’s opening scenes. First, a bi-curious teenager named Audrey (Arrow’s Bex Taylor-Klaus) makes-out with another girl from a nearby Catholic high school, unaware they’re being filmed. The make-out session is uploaded to YouTube as part of a cyber-bullying incident. Second, Nina (Bella Thorne), the girl responsible for uploading the video, is murdered in a drawn-out sequence purposefully evoking Drew Berrymore’s infamous death scene just with cell phones, webcams and a hot tub playing vital roles this time.
The Sydney Prescott of this particular story is Emma (Willa Fitzgerald), the most socially-conscious member of Nina’s social circle, which also includes two jocks (Connor Well, Tom Maden), an airhead with a thing for older men (Carlson Young) and a sweet Asian girl (Brianne Tju) who barely hides her nerdy side. Audrey’s best friend Noah (John Karna), i.e., the show’s stand-in for Jaimie Kennedy’s Randy, and the mysterious, handsome new kid in school (Kieran Wilcox) fill out the rest of the high school cast.
Like Sydney, Emma has a suspicious boyfriend (Well), and she’s being raised by a single parent, her mother Daisy Maggie (Tracy Middendorf) who works in the town’s coroner’s office. The pilot reveals that when Daisy was Emma’s age she was at the center of a town tragedy involving a deformed young man named Brandon James who went on a killing spree against those who had bullied him. Brandon’s crush on Daisy is ultimately what led to his arrest, but all of this was kept from Emma. It’s fairly clear that the brief flashbacks we see in the pilot don’t tell the full story about Brandon James, and that learning more about what really happened in the past will directly inform who we think the new present day killer might be.
It’s a show with a big cast – I haven’t even mentioned the town sheriff or sketchy English teacher yet – primarily set in high school and centers around a series of killings which appear to be retribution for a mysterious incident in the past which was covered up by those in power.
That bit about the TLC song should immediately let you know what kind of show Scream Queens is going to be – irreverent and campy as hell. Or, to put it another way, a Ryan Murphy show. The man behind Popular, Glee and American Horror Story typically relies on paper thin characterizations, frustratingly inconsistent plotting, and downright mean-spirited and nasty humor, but he usually gets away with everything (at first) by making it all seem so fun and grounded in some recognizable and relatable human drama. In its earliest incarnation, Glee was a true underdog story about a lovable high school teacher (Matthew Morrison) whose dream and passion had been deferred. In the ensemble cast, someone like the Barbara Streisand-as-a-high-school-student Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) was easier to take because her diva-like behavior and endless ambition was tempered by the dopey, aw-shucks football jock who just liked to sing in the shower (the late Cory Monteith). When Glee worked, and it’s arguable that it only truly worked for maybe that first season, it had a genuine heart, and it found ways to humanize its most inhumane characters.
Scream Queens doesn’t. Scream Queens is far more interested in being nasty, channeling most of its hatred through Kappa’s queen bitch Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts). It also wants to be campy and purposefully weird, e.g., Kappa’s legal liason has a medical condition that makes her only want to wear fashion from the 90s, one new pledge in a neckbrace (a very game Lea Michele) is so hard-up for female authority figures that she asks if she can call Chanel “mom,” another pledge is deaf but loves Taylor Swift. The grounding element in the story is supposed to be the inquisitive new Kappa pledge (Skyler Samuels’ Grace Gardner) who only sought to join the sorority as a way of symbolically connecting with her deceased mother who was a Kappa in her college days. We watch her say a bittersweet goodbye to her dad (Oliver Hudson) on the first day of college, quickly fall into a seemingly sweet and goofy early romance with the editor of the school newspaper (Diego Boneta), and go head-to-head with Chanel for turning Kappa into something her mother probably wouldn’t approve of.
Grace never completely feels like the grounding force the show wants her to be because it’s too pre-occupied with giving Chanel bitchy voice-over monologues explaining how things work on campus or letting (the fantastic, as always) Jamie Lee Curtis’ Dean Munsch take the voice-over mic to complain about how much it sucks trying to cover up a campus murder in the age of social media. In comparison to such larger-than-life figures, Grace seems a tad toothless, as if she’s a character from a different, far more normal show. Even Abigail Breslin as one of Chanel’s top lieutenants at the sorority seems more interesting, but not interesting in the sense that you’d care if she’s the next to die.
But you don’t watch a Ryan Murphy show and then turn around and complain about it being a Ryan Murphy show. As an anonymous TV showrunner told THR in his mini-review of Scream Queens, “[Scream Queens is] uber-campy high school horror homage. Vicious. Funny. Highly stylized. Could get old quickly but very confidently made. You have to be all in for Ryan Murphy’s oeuvre to not want to turn this off after 20 minutes. But if you are, you have a new show!”
That pretty much perfectly sums it up, and Scream Queens is definitely funny (almost everyone on the show, after all, is a cartoon character). MTV’s Scream is very interested in using our modern obsession with technology and social media to enhance the horror; Scream Queens just wants to laugh about how one of its victims will have a text-off with her killer being dying. It’s two very different approaches to basically the same exact material, and I’d kind of be okay with Scream Queens if any of the characters were worth caring about.
Scream Queens has the big name producer and cast members (in addition to Curtis, Roberts and Michele there’s also a Jonas brother), a much bigger budget, impeccable production values and a higher gore factor. However, I don’t get a sense from Scream Queens that Ryan Murphy truly has any deep passion for the slasher genre. It’s just another form he can use to tell Ryan Murphy stories. Scream, on the other hand, seems very interested in still upholding slasher film conventions while at the same time commenting upon them. That’s not to say that I found the episodes scary, but more that I appreciated the effort to present genuine horror instead of ironic, campy horror.
Oddly, Noah’s voice and speech patterns make him sound like Topher Grace’s younger brother
Honestly, Scream’s Noah summed it up best in the following scene near the end of pilot, walking down the school hallway and talking to his potential girlfriend Riley about how to adapt the slasher to TV:
Noah: The thing you have to remember is that the whodunit may not be as important in our story
Riley: So it’s more of a whydoneit?
Noah: No, I’m saying that you need to forget it’s a story – that someone might die at every turn. You see you have to care if the smoking hot lit teacher seems a little too interested in his female students. You have to care if the teen wins the big game. You have to care if the smart, pretty girl forgives the dumb jock
Riley: Sounds like Friday Night Lights
Noah: Exactly. You root for them. You love them. So when they are brutally murdered it hurts.
By my count, I have seen four characters killed in Scream’s first four episodes, and four in Scream Queens’ first two episodes. When Scream did it after its pilot, it hurt, both because of the sympathy the show had built up for the victim but also in the way the murder was depicted and enhanced by using a teenager’s over-reliance on social media and cell phones against them. When Scream Queens did it, I laughed because I was supposed to, but I didn’t really care.
Scream Queens is good for a laugh, and the whodunnit mystery is intriguing enough, particularly due to the cliffhanger at the end of the second episode. Scream, I gather from the internet, ultimately reached a deeply disappointing answer to its central whodunnit, but I’m finding the journey getting there far more fruitful than anything I expect out of Scream Queens.