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I really had no interest in the new show Scream Queens until I saw how bad the reviews were after the first showing. I just had to see some of it myself. I watched maybe ten minutes of the second showing of the pilot last night. It certainly was bad, but not exactly bad enough in a way to be enjoyable.
Apparently they were trying to emulate the outrageous, purposely bad and financially successful Scream movies. Most of the comedy in the Scream movies is from over-the-top sexual humor. Since that isn't allowed on network TV, the TV show had to come up with something else. As far as I got they were relying on a souped-up version of Cordelia and the Cordettes in a college sorority. I think Josh Whedon got more humor out of the idea in seconds than Scream Queens did in 10 minutes. The Scream movies were "bad" because they were horribly campy on purpose. Scream Queens was bad because of the writing, direction, and lack of anything exceeding the lamest humor. The timing was horrendous. The main character seems to have been named Chanel solely for the purpose of a wheezingly long drawn-out lead up to a joke about the brand name Chanel Number 5. There were better jokes that just got drug out into nonexistence. I got the feeling that if they had pressed everything they had for the episode into a half hour, they might have had an outrageously funny show. But the pilot was two full hours, and just ten minutes of that felt like forever.
One word about the critics: There were endless things to gripe about in the first ten minutes of Scream Queens, but one thing that apparently set some critics off was the phrase "white mammy." It seems there was indignation about both about the word "mammy" and the use of it with the word "white." Critics shouldn't attempt to be censors, and that's what this uproar was about. The whole point of the phrase from Chanel was to show how nasty a human being she was. Critics who decried the phrase as racist a) weren't paying attention and b) were wasting their breath on the obvious.
Apparently they were trying to emulate the outrageous, purposely bad and financially successful Scream movies. Most of the comedy in the Scream movies is from over-the-top sexual humor. Since that isn't allowed on network TV, the TV show had to come up with something else. As far as I got they were relying on a souped-up version of Cordelia and the Cordettes in a college sorority. I think Josh Whedon got more humor out of the idea in seconds than Scream Queens did in 10 minutes. The Scream movies were "bad" because they were horribly campy on purpose. Scream Queens was bad because of the writing, direction, and lack of anything exceeding the lamest humor. The timing was horrendous. The main character seems to have been named Chanel solely for the purpose of a wheezingly long drawn-out lead up to a joke about the brand name Chanel Number 5. There were better jokes that just got drug out into nonexistence. I got the feeling that if they had pressed everything they had for the episode into a half hour, they might have had an outrageously funny show. But the pilot was two full hours, and just ten minutes of that felt like forever.
One word about the critics: There were endless things to gripe about in the first ten minutes of Scream Queens, but one thing that apparently set some critics off was the phrase "white mammy." It seems there was indignation about both about the word "mammy" and the use of it with the word "white." Critics shouldn't attempt to be censors, and that's what this uproar was about. The whole point of the phrase from Chanel was to show how nasty a human being she was. Critics who decried the phrase as racist a) weren't paying attention and b) were wasting their breath on the obvious.