By Back when MTV first announced they were developing a pilot based on the Scream films, I thought it was a great idea. I have a huge fondness for the films themselves, and barring Scream 3, no other series did more for the slasher genre. I was hoping that the TV series would do the same for horror TV shows, too. A TV series based on a slasher? That’s unheard of.
Unfortunately, Scream: The TV Series pretty much squanders any goodwill and wastes your time.
We’re at the halfway point in the series (episode six is premiering later this evening), and I feel like I’m hate watching just to see how much worse things could get. This completely goes against the showrunners’ initial philosophy of getting the viewers at home to care about the characters as much as possible before offing them one by one. It’s also a terrible way to watch slasher films. When you start rooting for the killer themselves, the film isn’t taken very seriously. Take mid-franchise Nightmare on Elm Street, for example. When those films started making themselves all about Freddy’s antics (and only served to develop his personality rather than any of his victims), the goofy tone made it a horror franchise in name only. While there’s definitely an audience for that kind of property, it’s definitely not what MTV’s Scream wants.
But I don’t know where it all went wrong. Things started off sort of promising in the pilot episode (written by film series writer Kevin Williamson), but that episode was full of so many problems. Pointed dialogue, archetypes, and its intro, while well done, only mirrored the series’ openings thus far. It seemed adapting the films was a fool’s errand as Scream 4 completely destroyed its own existence already. The fourth film already did what you’d expect a modern Scream to do: used new technologies in an interesting way, break down existing archetypes, and establish a new status quo (which was, hilariously, the old one). So when the TV series seemed to be taking a step back, it already lost. It would’ve been fine had any of its new choices felt compelling.
What are those new choices? Existing in a universe completely separated from the films (its yet to be confirmed if the “Stab” movies exist, so I’ll assume this is just a new timeline or something), it’s set in a town named Lakewood where a killer named Brandon James once terrorized kids in a high school. The new Ghostface’s mask is based on that guy’s face, too. So the main mystery of the series is figuring out how much this new set of deaths has to do with the old one. But, five episodes in, I don’t care about any of it. Everyone in this show is terrible. Terrible characters make for good TV all the time, but that’s when there’s adequate drama to be mined from their poor decisions. Here it just seems like there’s some deficiency in each character’s core that causes a disconnect with the audience. It doesn’t help that there’s a noticeable drop in quality in each episode where someone doesn’t die.
For as many missteps Scream has had, there’s definitely some hope. With only a few episodes to go before season end, there’s plenty of potential for the show to hit that “so bad, it’s good” sweet spot. Episode three “Wanna Play a Game?” was great in that regard. It was so bad, all of the terrible decisions actually coalesced into a great sequence. Spoiler, I guess if you still want to watch this show despite me asking you not to, one girl dies while facetiming and her last words are “I can see the stars.” It’s magical, and the series has yet to bring that same kind of ingenuity to the table again. I’m hoping that it’ll happen once more, but that’s a thin hope. It’s like hoping the garbage doesn’t smell so bad after you’ve been forced to take in it so many times.
It might be gauche to judge a TV series based on a few episodes (judge the first one posted above for yourself), but I really tried to stick it out. After MTV announced it’s getting a second season, I really don’t see this working out. Unless it means we’ll be getting a brand new cast and story each season, with some returning characters a la the Scream sequels, I can’t see this show continuing. There’s a semblance of an endgame in sight, but it’s going to be quite a struggle to get there.
So why even struggle? Don’t bother with this at all.