Why the Scream TV Series Just Didn’t Work

True fans of the genre quickly realized that this show was barely fitting for the slasher genre, as the writers would give a death or two on average, and those deaths were almost always in the first 10 or last five minutes of an episode. When the season is over, after hours of storytelling, the endings of all three seasons were disappointing. In fact, pacing was the deadliest killer on the show.

That also meant there was a lot of time to fill, and there were two big issues with that pace. Most prominently, the showrunners chose to make the series more similar That’s OKor more precisely pretty Little Liars. It was involved in teenage drama, rumor, and bullying, and that was never a slasher film’s forte. The genre is typically aimed at younger people, of course, and features mostly younger characters, but not to relive the same day they just had in high school before hitting the theater. Slashers was meant to be a dark cathartic escape.

The characters

While some of the characters fit well with the genre’s archetypes, notably “Final Girl” Emma (Willa Fitzgerald), there weren’t too many standout characters to really root for. That goes with the format.

The format of the TV series allowed more time to get to know these characters, who as archetypes are usually nothing more than a certain sized pen that fits into a certain sized hole. When shifts were suddenly given, they almost always were too much. The constant twists and turns in terms of who’s an antagonistic character and who’s a hero, who’s redeemable and who’s pure evil became frustrating, or often the characters got too big and melodramatic.

Noah, a clear homage to Randy (Jamie Kennedy) from the original Scream Movies, clearly, should be the staple that all Scream episodes need — a pop-culture-obsessed nerd who’s the one to jettison metafilm analogies and references Williamson has made so popular. But because a TV show needs so much more from a character, Noah became an all-encompassing, almost omnipotent nerd character: he was a hacker, he was a STEM genius who could triangulate satellites and track smartphones, and he was working on a comic book store. Granted, Randy worked at a video rental company in the original film, but he stayed in his lane. The show’s writers merely adapted Noah and so many other characters to their needs to further the story rather than make it believable.

This constant shift in tone, motivation, and morality created so many characters that were difficult to understand and support. were no more Scream Fan-loving fan favorites like Dewey (David Arquette), instead we had to pick specific moments to actually cheer for a character and hope it would last.