MTV
The hit horror franchise Scream has come to television courtesy of MTV, and the first episode featured a lot of exposition but few chills. Of course, that is to be expected when you have to introduce at least a dozen characters into an all too familiar plot … which is basically the plot of the movie. The show starts out with mean girl (really, really mean) Nina (Bella Thorne) and her dopey, horny boyfriend Tyler returning from some shady business (secretly videotaping a fellow female student making out in a car with another girl and posting the video online instantly), Nina goes into her fabulous home with windows for walls and a swimming pool (sound familiar) and receives texts from Tyler that seem place him in the house. The texts become creepier until Nina turns it into an invite to join her in the hot tub, and he does. Well, his head does. Needless to say, Nina (like Drew Barrymore in the original movie) is not long for this world (thankfully because she is just awful).
The rest of the episode spends a lot of time introducing us to good girl Emma (Willa Fitzgerald) — or is she? — and spoiled, mean girl Brooke (Carlson Young), jock/Emma’s boyfriend Will (Connor Weil) and dumb jock Jake (Tom Maden), outsider/cyber-bullying victim Audrey (Bex Taylor-Claus), Noah (John Karna) the outsider with a serial killer/horror movie fetish, Emma’s mother Maggie (Tracy Middendorf), Sheriff Hudson (Jason Wiles) and Amadeus Serafini as Kiernan, the new kid in town who also happens to be the sheriff’s son. You can pretty much find a correlation to the teen character in the show with the original characters in the movie as well as more than a few nods here and there to keep the fans happy. The cast is actually pretty good, but I found Tracy Middendorf’s performance just painful, like she would have rather been anywhere else but on that set.
How will the suspense of a two-hour movie will carry out over ten episodes? tweet
As the first episode of a show that promises people will die every week (much as Fox’s upcoming Scream Queens has) only kills off one minor character on screen (and one even more minor character off), you have to wonder how the suspense of a two-hour movie will carry out over ten episodes. The pilot has already set up a bunch of obvious red herring characters (Kiernan, Will, Jake) but it also doesn’t seem to be shy about making us question almost all of them. What a prolonged series can do that a movie cannot is give us time to know the characters and, as Noah explains when adapting a slasher movie as a TV show, care for them so that when they are killed, it hurts.
The show also sets up what could be another red herring with a flashback twenty years earlier to the story of Brandon James, a deformed high-schooler who was bullied unmercilessly and went on a murder spree among the students who hurt him. A local girl known only as Daisy was used as bait to get him to the lake, but a trigger happy cop shot him and the body was never recovered. Could Brandon still be alive? It sure seems that way when “Daisy” receives a package containing a heart (not human), and we learn that “Daisy” is Maggie, now the town coroner. The package also contained a note, “Emma looks just like you at that age,” making us wonder who else could know Maggie was “Daisy” since she said only her family ever called her that.
We are teased with a few more deaths (Brooke and Noah are both in life-threatening situations at one point) that are just teases to help ramp up the tension, and by the end of the first episode Emma is receiving a call from someone who seems to know her every move, which transitions into Noah on the phone, leaving us with a very mysterious image of him brushing his hair with his hand and leaving what looks like a blood smear across his forehead. Of course, it’s much too obvious for Noah to be the killer at this point … or is that just what they want us to think?
While the first episode ended up being like a superhero origin story that had to set everything up for the next nine, I’m hoping the show can go off in enough new and interesting directions to separate it from the movies. If MTV can take the title Teen Wolf and turn it into a show that bears absolutely no resemblance to its namesake, they should be able to make Scream something new and interesting.
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