TV adaptation is dead on arrival.
Review by Brandon Wolfe
Scream becoming a TV show at this point in the game is very odd, at least on MTV. Sure, we live in a culture that specializes in grave-robbing the past, unearthing musty old franchises to cash in on whatever residual name recognition can be extracted from their withering bones. But Scream is a property that has little, if any, familiarity to MTV’s tween target audience, many of whom (like some members of this show’s cast) were yet to be born when ol’ Ghostface went on his first rampage. If Scream were to be dusted off for a cinematic reboot, it would be difficult to feign surprise (other than that there remained any interest in something like that so soon after 2011’s Scream 4 came and went unnoticed), but a television series served up to an audience who wouldn’t know Gale Weathers if she backed over them with her news van seems peculiar. Perhaps MTV felt emboldened from successfully repackaging the even mustier Teen Wolf to its viewers.
Then there’s also the fact that Scream, as we know it, doesn’t really make sense as a TV show on any network, something this series actually acknowledges, much in the way that a fat kid makes fat jokes about himself before the other kids can do it. One of its characters, film and serial-killer aficionado Noah Foster (John Karna, the show’s wholly inadequate stand-in for Jamie Kennedy) points out how a slasher movie would not make sense as a television series, given that they’re all about buildup and quick release, where the serialized format requires a slower, more methodical approach. But openly acknowledging this, in the customary snake-eating-its-tail Scream house style, doesn’t neutralize the fact that Noah is absolutely correct. This franchise has always structured itself as a hall of mirrors, commenting on the tropes of the horror genre while both subverting and embodying them. Porting Scream’s signature meta approach over to TV doesn’t work in that same way because the horror niche that Scream represents simply doesn’t exist on TV. The show tries to point to The Walking Dead, Hannibal and American Horror Story in an attempt to create a larger horror context for itself in the current television landscape, but ignores that none of those shows have a single thing in common with each other, and even less in common with Scream.
Scream, the TV series, having immediately painted itself into a referential corner, is left attempting to ape Scream, the movie, which, again, the bulk of its audience has likely never seen. It opens with an extended sequence consciously designed to mimic the iconic Drew Barrymore opener of the film, with mean girl Nina Patterson (Bella Thorne) stalked and ominously texted around her palatial home by a masked assailant. This sequence immediately sets the stage for how wrongheaded this series is right out of the gate. There is little of the mounting dread the sequence’s cinematic counterpart had, no taunting, no “what’s your favorite scary movie?” interrogation, none of what made that scene so memorable. And since Nina has already been established as awful - she instigated the outing of a classmate by circulating a secret make-out video via social media, an element the series shares with the recent Unfriended and perhaps the only relevant new idea in this pilot episode - she has precisely none of the regular-girl affability afforded to Barrymore. When she is hacked to pieces, it’s hard to feel anything about it.
The series exists in the aftermath of this event, with the student body left shaken. Emma Duvall (Willa Fitzgerald) is our Neve Campbell here, positioned as the angelic protagonist. She is dating Will Belmont (Connor Weil), a secretive sort prone to blaming a dead cell-phone battery for his unavailability, and her entire circle of friends was tangentially involved in Nina’s viral outing of Audrey Jensen (Bex Taylor-Klaus), who once was Emma’s close friend. While the entire group converges for a wake (read: excuse for a party) for Nina, it begins to become clear that motives are not in short supply, and as original Scream nerd Randy Meeks once suggested, everyone’s a suspect.
The series also creates a backstory for its town of Lakewood, where some twenty years earlier, a deformed student named Brandon James once harbored an unrequited crush on a local girl, leading him to embark on a killing spree before being shot dead in the lake by the locals. This event still looms large over the Lakewood populace, and the onslaught of a new bloodbath reopens old wounds, particularly for the subject of that deadly crush, Maggie Duvall (Tracy Middendorf), who grew up to be the mother of Emma and who is now receiving gifts of removed animal hearts delivered to her doorstep. This story element, which evokes both Friday the 13th (deformed young boy dies in a lake) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (murdered killer strikes back from beyond the grave) without commenting on those cinematic links directly, as is Scream’s wont, is especially odd considering it calls to mind I Know What You Did Last Summer (also written by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson and released in Scream’s wake) more than it does Scream. It also threatens to add a potential supernatural bent to the proceedings (Noah, the victim of a mid-party hazing, claims something in the lake grabbed him from beneath to pull him down), something Scream, the film series, never attempted.
Perhaps the greatest headscratcher of this series is why it opted not to connect to the film series more directly. With the series taking place in the shadow of a twenty-year-old murder spree, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have had that historical event be the 1996 Woodsboro killings from the original Scream rather than conjuring up this Brandon James nonsense out of whole cloth? That would have immediately provided a fitting context for the series to exist within, and connected it to something it could draw from, as opposed to the series operating as an island with essentially nothing to sustain it. The unwillingness to embrace proper Scream iconography extends to the killer’s mask, which evokes the design of the original mask in a muted, far more prosaic way rather than simply reusing that mask. What, are the producers concerned that seeing such a renowned Scream image will detract from the experience of watching a Scream TV show?
These decisions to veer away from Scream and its hallmarks might have been commendable had the series concocted something unique and original in place of what it leaves on the table, but there is no evidence that this is the case in the pilot episode. The series evokes Scream with certain characters and scenes, but with all the blood leeched from it. Williamson’s script for the original film was vibrant and witty, crafting colorful characters and clever dialogue while still functioning as an effective horror film. This series does none of this, offering up a collection of bland, pretty faces reciting flat, terrible dialogue, with none of the artistry that director Wes Craven brought to the scenes where the characters were imperiled. It’s like a peek into an alternate universe where Scream actually was the sort disposable trash that it ingeniously thumbed its nose at and rose above. Go ahead and butcher this show, Mr. Ghostface. What good is it?
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