Scream Queens (2024)

TV Series Review

Some people think of sororities as vacuous institutions for pampered, privileged and morally challenged undergrads, useful only to instruct a girl on what shade of lipstick she should wear to an all-night drinking party.

But if you find the right one, sororities can be pretty killer. Literally.

Kappa Kappa Tau is the most elite and decadent sorority at Wallace University. Or, at least, it was before a serial killer started offing all the pledges. Queen bee Chanel Oberlin makes time to mock her fellow sisters between slaughters, while newcomer Grace Gardner tries to wrest control of the house from Chanel and restore it to what she imagines are its kinder, gentler roots.

Fat chance of that happening, given that the current crop of corpses started sprouting on the 20th anniversary of one of the most sordid chapters in KKT’s history: The night when a sister gave birth and then bled to death in a bathtub during a party.

Oh, did I mention that this is supposed to be a comedy?

Fox’s Scream Queens is the creation of the Ryan Murphy brain trust (which also includes Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan), the minds behind the goofy-but-salacious Glee and the innovative-but-grotesque American Horror Story. Fittingly, the new show is like the Lovecraftian offspring of both shows. Characters rattle off one-liners like tommy guns, and some of the jokes can even feel like timely commentary on today’s surreal culture. (One victim—battling with the devil-dressed killer—finds the time to type a Monty-Python-Castle-of-Aughhh-like missive on Facebook.)

But the content. Oh, the content! Perhaps the funniest thing about this show is that it premiered with a TV-14 rating.

For Scream Queens, Fox has doled out nearly as much money for fake blood as it has for celebrity cameos. Victims are dispatched in reliably grotesque (and frequently ludicrous) ways. Skin sluffs off bodies. Blood drains out of them in waterfalls. Body parts fly around the college campus like so many red robins.

And if mass murder wasn’t enough of an issue, Scream Queens also bathes in a slew of problematic collegiate stereotypes. Sex. Gay sex. Near nudity. Alcohol. Drugs. Scream Queens is what you’d get if Jason, Freddie and Michael Myers all pledged to a 21st-century version of Animal House.

No surprise, then, that the Parents Television Council dubbed Scream Queens the worst new show of 2015, saying that its “greatest shock is that it is on the public airwaves to begin with.”

The creators say that not many of the characters will have to suffer through the whole season. But those who do will, according to an interview with Murphy in Stack, “go on next season to a new location and a new terror.”

Now I’m screaming.

Episode Reviews

Scream Queens – September 22, 2015 -“Pilot/Hell Week”

In the two-part first episode, Grace and others pledge to Kappa Kappa Tau, but their initiation is interrupted by a series of murders. Go figure.

A woman’s face is pushed into a boiling deep-fat fryer, after which she peels her skin off in chunks before dying. A Kappa is stabbed to death. In flashback, another Kappa is killed with acid. A third bleeds out after giving birth in a bathtub. A pledge dies when the killer runs over her head with a riding lawn mower, the whirling blade flinging blood and gore everywhere. A woman’s body is found with a knife sticking through her neck. Another victim sprawls, mostly naked, on a candle-strewn table with his neck sliced open, blood coating his chest. (Note that bodies mysteriously disappear, so it’s possible some may not be dead.)

One closeted gay guy convinces a frat brother to let him sleep in his bed, and there’s talk of sexual contact. A lesbians’ view on straight sex also gets script time. And the college dean blackmails a male student into having sex with her. There are jokes about necrophilia, bestial*ty, incest, oral sex, “side boobs” and hom*osexuality. We see a sex doll. Both guys and girls run around and pose in their underwear.

Other topics of coarse conversation: vomit and defecation. One pledge is relieved that her roomie isn’t a “religious freak or a cutter.” Lots of racist jokes are made. Coeds and others drink wine, beer, scotch and champagne, and someone suggests giving a baby a Mojito. A reference is made to prescription drug abuse. We hear flurries of profanity, including “h—,” “b–ch,” “a–,” “p—ed,” “frickin'” and “d–n.” God’s name is abused.