Title: Scream TV Series Season 2
Starring: Willa Fitzgerald, Bex Taylor-Klaus, John Karna
Language: English
Genre: Crime, Drama, Horror
Episodes: 13
Here we are again with another exciting season of MTV's Scream The TV Series. I hope you read that with as much sarcasm as possible. Let's not dwaddle too much with this introduction and just jump right into the synopsis and review, shall we?
Three months after the string of Lakewood murders, Emma returns home after being treated for PTSD. All seems to be normal for the Lakewood Six: Emma, Audrey, Noah, Brooke, Kieran, and Jake. Emma tries to resume her life at home and finds comfort in her boyfriend Kieran as she gets back in the groove of school with her friends. Despite things being resolved and the killer disposed of, Noah becomes obsessed with the case and theorizes that the killer had an accomplice, which makes things uneasy with Audrey. Emma notices Noah's murder board and sees something familiar from her dreams, so she decides to investigate with Brooke and ultimately triggers another string of murders with a new killer on the loose.
Obviously, I wasn't too thrilled about watching another season of Scream The TV Series. If you haven't read my review on the first season, I really think you should check it out before moving further. I'll try not to spoil anything from the first season, but there's no guarantee. So, if you haven't watched the first season, proceed with caution. Anyway, going into this new season, I wasn't expecting much improvement, but honestly I was a little curious where they were going to go with Audrey and the cliffhanger ending as she was one of the few characters I liked and found interesting in the show. I didn't really care what happened to the other characters or who this new killer was. Pretty much I had a pessimistic outlook going into the second season, but I would try my hardest to find some redeeming qualities and improvements. On the other hand, I wasn't going to hesitate on dropping the series if I still didn't like it.
In this second season, the show kinda offers two plot points that eventually merge into one major plot. When the show begins, we have the situation between Noah and Audrey where Noah is trying to figure out if and who the accomplice was in the last season and the obvious new killer stalking our Lakewood survivors. Like the previous season, I enjoyed watching Noah and Audrey. Since it was revealed that Audrey had connections to Piper, she has this dilemma of balancing this dual life. She tries to cover her tracks while at the same time trying to maintain her friendship with the group. Then there's Emma trying to adjust to life after therapy, which is...meh, but let's not get into that just yet. Let's start with the good points and improvements in the show. Obviously, I still enjoy the chemistry between Noah and Audrey. To me, I feel like majority of the character development lies with them, while everyone else is stagnate. Noah becomes more confident in himself outside of his podcast and his obsession with Brandon James and the events that occurred in the previous season. Honestly, I feel like the second season finally gave Noah his own character and distanced himself from Scream's horror fanatic Randy. With Audrey, ah, she's still my favorite character in the show. I feel like she slowly pushed Emma out of the spotlight as the main character, which made me excited for reasons that'll be mentioned later. There was a lot of focus on her in the premiere episode and just following her made me happy. Her character was not just placed in a box because of who she is and she deals with a lot demons that gradually reveal itself. Their journeys/plotline was the reason I really kept going. I wanted to know how the dynamics of their friendship would change for better and worse when Zoe entered Noah's life and Audrey's relationship with Piper was revealed.
Unlike the first season, I didn't go in wanting to solve a mystery with the gang as I couldn't successfully do that in the first season due to the boring story. I'll admit that this season was a little more exciting, mostly because of things involving Noah and Audrey. Aside from that, we're stuck with Emma, who remains a bland main character with a flimsy personality. It feels like the show tries to give us reasons to care about her, but, for me, I felt absolutely nothing just like the first season. When the spotlight shifted from Audrey to Emma within the first and second episodes, my heart/interest suddenly dropped because I remembered that she's the real main character of the series and that's just unfortunate. I tried to get invested in Emma's struggle to cope with her trauma with Piper and losing her friends, but I just couldn't. Brooke was another character I didn't like so much in the first season. She continues to be my least favorite character in the show. Pretty much her purpose is relationship drama; something MTV is very good at using as a distraction...even though, it's not all that interesting. She's either going back and forth on whether she wants Jake, Gustavo, and Mr. Branson and that's pretty much all her character has to offer. She tries to gather some tough girl attributes from her counterparts Emma and Audrey, but they usually quickly dissolve. Surprisingly, I kinda liked Kieran a little more in this season, until the end of the show, unfortunately. In short, Noah and Audrey (and Zoe) were the most interesting characters in this whole show. Everyone else were either useless, boring, or followed your standard horror tropes.
Aside from the Noah investigation and Audrey's secret with Piper, the main story remained uninteresting. As I mentioned before, I wasn't really all that invested in finding out who the killer was. In fact, I didn't really care who they were at all. After dragging through the first season, I learned that this show really doesn't care about upholding the Scream legacy, but instead wants to focus on repetitive teenage drama, while trying to be some serious horror. The Scream franchise was purely meta. It had fun with itself by satirizing and following the rules of slasher films. This show doesn't want to do any of that. While it did provide some better kills and chases, it simply didn't leave as much of an impact on me. It doesn't help that the characters lacked...character. By the finale, it seemed like they had to throw some cliche conclusion that pales in comparison to its predecessor. Without spoiling the ending, I was kinda insulted. In the end, I just wanted things to shift so Audrey could be the main character. Noah and Audrey (and Zoe) brought a little excitement to this series. Even when Emma entered the scene with them, it really changed things. Although, I'll admit when the school was locked down, that was pretty entertaining.
Scream The TV Series remains subpar to its predecessor. While I did enjoy some elements of the mystery, the scenes involving Noah, Audrey, and Zoe is what really kept me watching as I enjoyed their chemistry together and their side of the story was mostly well put together. Really I think Audrey's presence becomes contagious when Emma is around her as well. In the end, the mystery isn't immersive enough to really care about who the killer is nor their motive. You still don't care about most of the characters presented in the series, whether they're new or old as they don't really add anything interesting to the story. But the show did improve a little bit in certain areas and, once again, that cliffhanger ending has me curious what's next for our group. MTV is having a 2 hour Halloween special in October for the show which apparently will be picking up things from the second season...or something like that.
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