Hey everyone, Pengu here! And this is my first review of something outside of video games and movies...a television series! Scream was actually a series of horror movies that I enjoyed, they were the right amount of gore, the right amount of suspense, and the right amount of B-movie vibes that made them pretty entertaining. When I first heard that they were making a TV series, I was actually pretty interested.
I've never been the biggest fan of MTV since they became more-reality show/less-music based...but I know they can go a bit further with their shows than say...something like the CW tends to go with the violence (which is a pretty big part of Scream).
But when the first season appeared on Netflix, I found myself watching it, and I had...mixed feelings about it. After the second season, my feelings were even more...mixed, maybe leaning slightly more into the negative, with the final episode being even more negative.
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So let's start off with the main plot.
Emma Duval is the smart and attractive protagonist that is pulled into a sinister game by a cruel and truly evil killer, one that promises to reveal her family's dark past while also killing those close to her in the process. Emma must play the game and face her fate head on.
So, that's the basic plot of Season 1, with it continuing into Season 2. Like Scream, this series is all about the phone calls that the characters get from the person using a voice changer to leave threats.
A new take that perhaps only Scream 4 started to adopt was involving cameras as well to help with the terrorizing. People's phones and webcams are used against them. Action cameras are also a main staple, as is different forms of hacking and sending things to everyone that people didn't want seen. Texting is also a popular one, with a majority of the deceptions coming in the form of characters getting texts that they believe to be legit from friends and family members.
Now, the killer is probably the show's strongest aspect in both seasons. Even though it's definitely not Ghostface (they never really give him a name in this one), you actually can feel how threatening this guy is. He's constantly tormenting the characters and luring them with various deceptions, and unlike the movies, with the added types of tricks and whatnot, he actually feels like much more of a threat.
I'll even admit, I much more appreciate the killer's voice in this compared to Ghostface's voice, as it's just slightly less human and much more obvious a voice changer...but can still sound immensely threatening. Not to mention, I actually even like the mask a bit more.
Here's the downside: Everything involving everything outside of the characters for the most part is downright boring and not remotely engaging. Emma is not the best protagonist, and none of the supporting characters outside of Noah and Audrey are in the least bit interesting. Brooke was probably one of my least favorite, having basically one personality for the first half of the show, and then having basically one other personality for the other half.
Likewise, the history-aspect is also incredibly boring to watch. I get that they wanted to make the TV series connected and thus needed some kind of connecting thread. However, the route they chose was, as I said, incredibly boring. I didn't care that the mother had some connection to some long-supposedly-dead lover that the killer chose to mimic. What I did care about was the killer and how they progressed through the series.
Also, I didn't care for all of the fake-outs. Many of the fake-out subplots (such as the awful setup for Jake and Will's subplot) felt incredibly ham-fisted and awful.
But by far, my least favorite bit was the reveals in both Seasons, although Season 2's reveal was far worse than Season 1's. Firstly, while I do appreciate the route they took with Season 1's killer, again it just felt a little forced to keep the plot interesting.
However, I do want to make something known about this show's run: there was a lot of fan backlash regarding the killer's identity, and so MTV changed things quite a bit during the seasons. During each season, the show hinted at the killer being Noah, and at one point very strongly it hinted at the accomplice being Audrey (in fact, the Season 1 finale strongly implied Audrey being the accomplice killer). However, fans were so in love with these characters that they went insane with negative comments about these characters being potential bad guys. MTV basically went in and re-wrote everything and altered who the killer was...
and my god does it show, especially in Season 2.
Because they had to alter the accomplice not being Audrey, they had to pretty much re-write and re-explain everything that they did in the previous season so that she wasn't the killer. The reasoning behind the letters that were an obvious implication was completely changed to something really unrealistic ("I didn't know the bad guy I brought to town was a killer" "I wanted her for my podcast to show how everyone is a hypocrite"), and I actually found Audrey even less likeable after they decided to change her character.
The worst part with Season 2 was that everyone knows the body count normally doubles in the new season. However, the body count in Season 2 was horrendously mild. Sure, people died (I think maybe 5-6 people died?), but good lord, I was expecting much more of a massacre.
Also, Season 2 tried to up the fake-outs by introducing an obviously-not-the-killer-but-made-to-look-like-one character who had an obsession with drawing characters dying or dead in comic book form, as well as another obviously-not-the-killer-but-given-a-dark-past character. I mean, you might as well have wrote "obvious fakeouts" on big signs that hung above them, because anyone would know straight-up that these people were obviously red herrings.
But by far, the actual season finale missed the mark. I know they didn't know at that point that MTV was going to turn around and order for a complete reboot of the series for Season 3 (different cast entirely and everything...a terrible move considering the loose ends of the current season followed by the build up for the next killer), but daaamn.
So in the last episode of Season 2, they revealed the accomplice, ending things happily, yadda yadda. However, at the very end, it's revealed that there's another killer who sends a threatening call to the convicted accomplice in jail, threatening him for using "his mask" without permission.
Okay, cool, we might see the person who inspired the actual mask coming in to finish his work, I can work with that to finally get some resolution.
But, no. The actual season finale was very much a letdown.
So it starts us off hopeful, cutting back to the convicted accomplice in jail, all of them getting killed off by the new killer who threatened the convicted accomplice. Cool, that's fantastic.
Then it cuts to the main characters going off to an island for some BS reason. Naturally, people start dying, but again the body count is pretty low. But unlike the regular killer, this one wears an entirely different mask, kills in entirely different ways, and is much less deceptive, much more random.
We find out that not only is the killer someone we've never met in the series...but it's not even the killer that was being built up. They're completely different people, with the revealed one basically just being a super-fan that wanted the main character for himself. There was literally no connection outside of that to anything whatsoever.
As if to give the viewers an even bigger middle finger, they end the episode (and thus the original series) hinting at a character with the last name of the very first killer checking into town, as well as the dad of the main character (who was also highly considered to be an accomplice/killer) standing over the grave of the convicted accomplice.
Overall, the series had an exceptional amount of potential. But since it was bogged down by boring filler and stupid subplots followed by unremarkable characters, it suffered. But what made it suffer the most was obvious fan interference, making the creators/show runners change everything they had originally planned...which honestly would have been 10x better than the result we were given. The only saving grace for the show was the killer themselves, who I enjoyed every time I saw or heard them on the screen. The kills were great (I enjoyed the amount of variety the kills had), the taunts were fun, and I enjoyed the traps. Likewise, the actors who played Noah, Audrey, and even Piper were pretty decent, even though the rest were mediocre to downright terrible (though I'll admit it's mainly due to bad writing).
