First Impressions: Scream Queens

FOX TUESDAYS 9/8c

Premise: A masked killer terrifies a group of shallow sorority girls. It is basically Pretty Little Liars with much better dialogue.

Verdict: Ryan Murphy’s craziness might really work in this setting.

I have such a complicated love/hate relationship with Ryan Murphy’s shows. A lot of times, his shows just make me roll my eyes, but at the same time I believe aspects of them are purely brilliant. Moreover, Ryan Murphy does not have a signature genre. He has done musical comedy (Glee), horror (American Horror Story), half-hour comedy (The New Normal) and edgy drama (Nip/Tuck). Not saying this is a bad thing… but it only adds to my confusion of how I feel about his writing style.

All this preamble just to say that I was expecting to end up hate-watching Scream Queens [as I did with all six seasons of Glee]. However… I have to admit, out of all the new shows I’ve watched so far, this is the one I enjoyed the most [the multi-V.O. aside, of which I am still not a fan].

Scream Queens is a straight forward satire of sorority life. Greek meets… well Scream. And it works really well. As expected, great dialogue and one-liners abound. Most of the characters are caricatures of mean girls; and some of them meet terrible [yet amusing] ends [acid in the spray tan e.g.]. I think we all secretly want to watch that…

Jamie Lee Curtis plays the Dean of the school… and she is basically Sue Sylvester 2.0. I love Jamie, but I am almost upset they didn’t just get Jane Lynch for this.

Only one more thing to point out. The show was a bit more gory than I anticipated [I’ll let you decide if that is a bad or good thing]. Remember that Mad Men incident with the lawn-mower? Well… let’s just say Scream Queens topped it.

Should you watch it? Yes, this is going to be a fun one.

P.S: I am going to go ahead and call it. I think Oliver Hudson is the red devil. [He wouldn’t be my first choice for a nice dad but… a masked serial killer on the other hand… I can totally see it].