I admit that TV is not something I watch frequently as there’s plenty of incredibly popular programmes I have yet see of which include House of Cards, Breaking Bad and anything Marvel (except for one episode of Jessica Jones). That said, however, as a horror fan and a fan of the Scream franchise I did check out the TV series of Scream.With the new series about to start, I thought I’d review the first series.
The first season follows a string of murders that take place in the fictional town of Lakewood. At the middle of these killings is Emma Duval (Willa Fitzgerald), a high school student who has very strong connections to the town’s dark history.
Broadcast on MTV and written by Kevin Williamson (who also wrote the original Scream film) the Scream TV series updates the original with new tropes and modern technology such as tweeting and viral videos (which seem to be the cause of all this bloodshed), but that said the understanding of how technology works in the modern world is pretty basic.
Anyway the Scream TV series has your basic cast of characters you’d expect to find in many highschool films and TV shows. We have the stereotypical bitch, the dumb jock, the golden girl, the geek, the mysterious, handsome newcomer and the lesbian. Because TV allows for more time to devote to character development, it’s kinda disappointing that the characters don’t really step out their stereotypical shadows. The majority of them are quite bland and boring.
The series spends a lot of time refrencing horror films of old, it’s a dangerous route to take to homage the cliches of the classics, and it’s difficult to avoid falling into the trap of just being cliched ridden rather than homaging the classic films. Whilst the horror elements and homarging aren’t a problem, the various subplots, such the teacher-student relationship, are straight from the school of generic screen-writing.
That said, however, I did enjoy binge watching the entire series over the course of a few days. I was undoubtedly entertained by the horror homages, the hunt for the killer and mystery surrounding the backstory of the killer even though there are more reveals and red herrings than there are herrings in the sea. By the end it’s quite easy to figure out the killer by simple process of elimination, but the journey to get there is quite an entertaining one.
3/5
