Scream Queens (2015)

At its best, Scream Queens challenges our motives for empathizing with outcasts in the first place. When it specifically targets younger generations on that front, it feels fresh.

The first two hours are well worth watching. It's funny stuff.

Heroes Reborn and Scream Queens are both good. They're both dead-on in doing what they've set out to do, and both two-hour premieres (Scream today, Heroes Thursday) are voice-driven, exciting, and very much themselves.

The joy, though, is listening to Roberts’ Chanel Oberlin bark at her minions and security officer Denise Hemphill (a brilliant Niecy Nash) savor the show’s writing. They’re funny in a fresh, interesting way that fits nicely with Murphy’s social commentary.

If crazed killings and macabre laughs aren’t your thing, you may want to avoid the show. So far, though, Scream Queens is outlandishly fun.

Whatever your perspective, if the idea of Glee or Popular spiked with wanton slaughter sounds appealing, Scream Queens initially should have you covered.

Instead of being seriously macabre, it goes for broad satire, although it certainly has its gory moments. It’s an odd mash-up that leaves little room for real connection to the characters, having faith instead in laughs and blood. Then again, laughs and blood have a good track record.

Scream Queens feels in almost every way like American Horror Story Lite, which is not so bad.

Like AHS and Glee, it could become a mess, but the launch is fun.

If you like the idea of a murder victim texting endlessly, even ridiculously, for help mid-attack... if you enjoy the fright of horror only when undercut by laughs, Scream Queens may be for you. For many, sampling the pilot will be enough.

It's cheeky and lighthearted escapism perfect for unwinding on a Tuesday night.

Despite all its flaws, vulgarities and miscues, and for all the justifiable fear that, like many shows from this team, it will go screaming off the quality cliff, there is an energy to Scream most other new shows are missing. It's different. And it has Curtis.

The entire two-hour pilot is parody, on top of parody, on top of parody. The sentences coming out of Chanel’s mouth are beyond anything a clichéd mean girl would utter in other high school or sorority movies, while every homage to films like Scream or Urban Legends is taken to the extreme. What makes it work is Murphy’s renowned world-building.

The show operates at such a constant, rapid-fire level that it’s almost exhausting.

The referential humor of Scream Queens tends to be better on the “Halloween” side of the equation than on the “Heathers” side, and some of its sendups of horror movies--or of horror-movie sendups--are pretty funny.... Scream Queens bogs down, though, when it enters another familiar Brennan-Falchuk-Murphy territory, which could be called identity entertainment

This one’s just so relentless. As in “Glee” or “American Horror Story,” Murphy delights in misdirection and abrupt shifts of tone, both of which he does well. The dialogue is snappy and no pretension escapes un-nailed.

Scream Queens is just too dumb to be fun.

The writing is sharp, but sharp-edged too. Overwhelmed with venom, Queens tends to be more mean-spirited than free-spirited. The cast is energetic, particularly Roberts and Curtis, who look like they're having a great time. But they can't quite convey that fun to the audience.

It’s a very energetic two-hour premiere replete with cartoonish screams and schemes. But a cesspool runs through it in the person of the noxious Chanel.

Ultimately, with its ceaseless meanness and barrage of put-downs, Scream Queens is more exhausting than exhilarating.

The satire is sharp, including a scene in which one sister texts with her killer as he's trying to kill her. But the two-hour premiere does itself no favors, so overstuffed with scares, silliness, intrigues and occasional moments of real horror that it fails to coalesce into something resembling coherence.

Even Murphy apologists may cool to Scream Queens, a patchwork of his earlier series that barely feels like a new show, much less a new genre.

Get past the baubles, though, and the series simply feels too derivative to be truly exciting or particularly suspenseful. So while the casting and format should be enough to help Scream Queens make some initial noise ratings-wise, creatively speaking, there’s just not much here to shout about.

Robust but repetitive.

The performances are enjoyable, for the most part, but the script is surprisingly flat for a Murphy-Falchuk show.

It's too silly for real horror fans and too gross for the fainthearted.

I loved every minute of tonight's two-hour premiere of Fox's new horror-comedy, Scream Queens, except for the ones Jamie Lee Curtis wasn't in.... This is a show that's gathered an impressive lineup of young names, including Emma Roberts as the ultimate mean girl, Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine"), Keke Palmer ("Akeelah and the Bee"), Billie Lourd (a newbie who'll also be in the new "Star Wars" movie with mom Carrie Fisher) and, of course, Michele, and then cast them as cliches.

In a way, "Scream Queens" is a combination of all [Murphy's previous] shows. Just not in a good way.

The deranged creativity of the slayings make for perhaps its only real horror/joy.... The rest of the show is terrible-bad, rather than terrible-good.

A hot mess that sets out to be so many things at once – scary, silly, smart and self-aware among them – and fails on every count. What’s left over is about as appetizing as a mouthful of battery acid.

This mean-spirited and imbecilic cartoon feels concocted by 14-year-olds sifting through their ugliest tweets. [21-27 Sept 2015, p.17]