$1.1 Billion Horror Franchise’s Forgotten 30-Episode TV Show Deserves Another Chance

Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb Published Oct 30, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Sign in to your ScreenRant account While one horror franchise has earned an astounding $1.1 billion at the box office, that has not stopped MTV's small-screen spinoff series from being unfairly forgotten in the 11 years since its 2015 release. Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake upended expectations when the show became the franchise’s most critically successful entry to date by far, but it is worth noting that the Friday the 13th movies were never critical darlings by any means. In fact, while Crystal Lake’s clever Friday the 13th retcons were a lot of fun, part of the reason that the show’s reception seems so impressive is that the creators were working with an ideal intellectual property. Friday the 13th and its sequels are fondly loved by fans, but the original movies were never particularly well received critically, and even their most ardent defenders can admit that some of the franchise’s outings are pure hokum. Thus, like From Dusk til Dawn’s 2014 TV series, Crystal Lake could borrow plenty of memorable images, moments, and lines from the original movie without worrying about failing to live up to what was always, ultimately, a three-star classic. The same was never true for 2015’s Scream: The Series, a spinoff of the iconic slasher franchise that had the grave misfortune of trying to replicate Scream’s appeal on the small screen. While Scream: The Series couldn’t quite pull this off, it was better than many reviews claimed. Scream’s 30-Episode TV Show Rebooted The Franchise Way Before Scream 2022 Debuting in June 2015 on MTV, Scream: The Series was set in the small town of Lakewood, where Willa Fitzgerald’s seemingly ordinary teenage heroine Emma found herself at the center of a string of killings. As a masked murderer targeted her friends, Emma needed to enlist John Karna’s nerdy film obsessive Noah and Ben Taylor-Klaus’s sardonic young filmmaker to help her work out the killer’s plan and motives. While this all might sound fairly familiar for fans of the Scream movies, Scream: The Series had a few unwelcome surprises in store for viewers expecting the show to look, sound, or feel like 2011’s Scream 4. For one thing, the killer wore a new mask, and there were almost no self-aware horror references coming from the villain during the show’s taunting phone calls. Horror Franchise Original Movie Release Year Number of Movies Average Rotten Tomatoes Score Scream 1996 6 70% The Exorcist 1973 6 40% Halloween 1978 13 44% Child’s Play 1988 7 50% The Conjuring 2012 10 55%* A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984 9 50% Candyman 1992 4 60%* Friday the 13th 1980 12 27% Wrong Turn 2003 7 20% Leprechaun 1993 8 15% Scream: The Series was also not set in Woodsboro, meaning there was no mention of Sidney, Gale Weathers, Dewey, or anyone else from the original movies. In fact, the MTV show seemingly set up an entire new continuity and canon for the franchise, with a new setting, new characters, and no mention of any events of the Scream movies. The pilot’s opening scene killed off Bella Thorne’s character in an obvious homage to Drew Barrymore’s death in Scream, but that was the extent of the show’s links to its namesake. Scream’s TV Spinoff Never Felt Like Part of the Franchise With its comparatively family-friendly TV-14 rating and the plot’s focus on soapy teen drama, Scream: The Series felt a lot more like Pretty Little Liars than the far darker, gorier Scream movies. However, this was not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the same year’s campy horror comedy Scream Queens went with a sillier, more overtly comedic tone and still managed to win over a cult audience precisely because of how wacky its story became. For all the reasons listed above, Scream: The Series was more of a dark teen thriller than a slasher series, but this meant that the soapy, twisty mystery had an appeal of its own that was largely ignored in retrospective autopsies on the series. Most write-ups of Scream: The Series were penned around the time that 2022’s reboot movie arrived, and most of these retrospectives bemoaned the MTV show’s lack of links to the original movies. However, it is easier to see the appeal of Scream: The Series now that the Scream movies themselves are no longer as widely well liked as they once were. While 2022’s Scream reboot was a critical hit and Scream VI was a solid if unspectacular follow-up, Scream 7 was the franchise’s worst outing to date by a stretch. Built on a string of thin in-jokes and corny callbacks to the earlier movies, Scream 7 was self-satisfied, un-scary, and terminally dull. The sequel lost the intensity that animated the first two movies, but also the warm character comedy that redeemed Scream 4 and Scream VI despite their comparative lack of substantial scares. As a result, the sequel proved that Scream: The Series might not have been so bad after all. Scream’s TV Series Fell Victim To An Old Horror Problem Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb Not only did season 1 have a likable lead in future Reacher star Fitzgerald, but Taylor-Klaus and Karna also put in superb work as the heroine’s sidekicks. Amadeus Serafini was appropriately unnerving as the Billy Loomis-esque love interest, Carlson Young’s Brooke was a classic mean girl with a heart of gold, and Tom Maden threatened to steal the entire series as the comically vile jock Jake. With a strong, appealing and a genuinely unpredictable mystery story at its core, Scream: The Series had all the ingredients of a cult classic. The show’s biggest problem was its genre as, outside of Slasher and maybe Harper’s Island, slasher TV shows almost always run into the same existential issue. Like Scream Queens, American Horror Story: 1984, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, and I Know What You Did Last Summer’s 2021 reboot, Scream: The Series couldn’t work out how to make its characters appropriately unappealing. It is always hard for a slasher show to justify why viewers should get invested in characters who they know are doomed thanks to the very format of the show itself. The five-season horror anthology Slasher worked around this by making its characters outright terrible, ensuring viewers root for their deaths instead. As a teen show, Scream: The Series couldn’t quite get this dark. Thus, Scream: The Series was stuck in an unenviable middle ground between a conventional teen mystery drama and a true horror, meaning likable supporting characters ended up killed shortly after viewers started truly caring about them. 2019’s belated season 3 did bring back Scream’s Roger L Jackson as Ghostface’s voice and some of the franchise’s self-aware meta commentary, but by then, it was too little too late for Scream: The Series. Release Date 2015 - 2019-00-00 Network MTV, VH1 Directors Dennis Widmyer, Brian Dannelly, Jamie Travis, Kevin Kolsch, Rodman Flender, Tanya Hamilton, Tim Hunter, Darren Grant, Daniel Stamm, Oz Scott, E.L. Katz, Scott Speer, Ti West, Leigh Janiak Writers Meredith Glynn, Erin Maher, Jill E. Blotevogel, Kay Reindl, Jordan Rosenberg, Steve Yockey, Jaime Paglia, Brian Sieve, Michael Gans, Richard Register, Anna Christopher, David Coggeshall, Heath Corson, Penny Cox, Sherman Payne Cast Willa Fitzgerald Emma Duvall