Trivia / Scream: The TV Series

• Actor Allusion:
  • In the fifth episode of season 1, Audrey can be seen reading a comic adaptation of Arrow, which Bex Taylor-Klaus worked on.
  • This isn't the first time Willa Fitzgerald has played a teenage girl named Emma.
  • At one point Noah tells Audrey that his favorite serial killer is BTK. Which is, of course, also the initials of Bex Taylor-Klaus.
• Celebrity Paradox: Very minor one, but Bryce Romero who plays a student at Lakewood, also appeared as a Glader named Jack in the first two The Maze Runner (2014) films.
• Dueling Shows: With Scream Queens (2015) and Dead of Summer, two other teen-oriented Horror Series.
• Dawson Casting: Applies to all actors portraying the main cast, who are all in their 20s while playing high school students. The only aversion is Riley, who is played by 17-year-old Brianne Tju.
• Executive Meddling: Dimension Films and MTV pressured the showrunners to change the second killer multiple times, which necessitated many impromptu rewrites by the production.
  • Season 1 showrunners Jill Blotevogel and Jaime Paglia initially had Noah as the second killer before settling on Audrey. However, Dimension was unhappy with the showrunners' creative decisions, resulting in Paglia quitting and Blotevogel demoted to the role of consultant.
  • Season 2 showrunners Michael Gans and Richard Register were brought on to revise the killer's identity. According to an interview, both showrunners watched Season 1 to see who was a plausible suspect and came to the conclusion that Noah ^note While the Season 2 showrunners go out of their way to keep their original choice a secret, they confirm that said choice is a character from Season 1 and not someone introduced in Season 2. In the episode "In the Trenches", Piper's accomplice calls Emma and verifies that he has Will tied up next to him, which eliminates Brooke and Jake as suspects because they and, more importantly, Piper are with Emma at this time. Furthermore, as noted above, the Season 1 showrunners initially set up Noah as Piper's accomplice before selecting Audrey instead. and Kieran were the only viable options. Even then, the higher-ups were hesitant about the showrunners' final decision to make Kieran the killer and tried to change the killer once more, this time unsuccessfully.
• In Memoriam: The Season 1 finale is dedicated to Wes Craven, who died the week before it aired.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • The show is set in a town called Lakewood, and the license plates on the cars resemble Colorado plates. In late 2015, the real-life town of Lakewood, Colorado (a suburb of Denver) saw a string of bank robberies by a trio of robbers wearing Ghostface masks.
  • Bex Taylor-Klaus came out as pansexual in 2016 like their character Audrey.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Bex Taylor-Klaus is openly pansexual.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Voice actor Roger L. Jackson is replaced by Mike Vaughn as the iconic voice of Ghostface for the first two seasons. Jackson did, however, return for Scream: Resurrection.
  • The foreign dubs of Season 2 replaced most of the actors, with the worst offenders being French (France to Belgium) and Latin Spanish (Chile to Colombia). European Spanish changed cities from Barcelona to Madrid, keeping only Emma's voice actor. The Italian dub stayed in Rome, but changed studios with new voices for everyone except Emma's mother. The Portuguese dub was mostly safe, staying in Rio de Janeiro but changing studios (Audrey and Ghostface were the most notable recasts).
• What Could Have Been:
  • On an episode ^note Relevant conversation begins around 16:00. of the Shock Waves podcast, John Karna confirmed that his character Noah originally was the killer in Season 1. He and the interviewers speculate that the executives switched tracks because Noah was too much of a fan-favorite to die a villain. Corroborating Karna's claim, an early draft of the pilot also confirmed that the red substance on Noah's forehead was blood rather than paint like in the final cut of the episode.
  • Season 1 co-showrunner Jill Blotevogel reaffirmed in an interview that Audrey was supposed to be the second Ghostface and confirmed she was the one who kidnapped Will. However, after Blotevogel stepped down, the Season 2 showrunners ignored this in favor of making Kieran the partner instead.
  • The Season 2 showrunners, Michael Gans and Richard Register, stated that Kieran was not their first choice for the second killer. They initially had another character (which they don't name) as the second killer, but Dimension Films and MTV rejected it almost immediately. The Season 2 showrunners also remarked that even Kieran wasn't a hard lock as the killer because the executives briefly asked them again to change Ghostface to someone else like Eli when the showrunners were about to shoot the season finale.
  • In 2022, season two show runners Michael Gans and Richard Register did an interview with Jason Jenkins for Bloody-Disgusting in which they discussed their plans for the third and fourth seasons. (The show was instead given a full Continuity Reboot, partly because Bex Taylor-Klaus decided to focus on voicing Pidge in Voltron: Legendary Defender rather than returning, and partly because of Creative Differences with MTV, the same reason why season one show runners Jill Blotevogel and Jaime Paglia also left.)
    • Season three would have had Emma leave Lakewood for college to get away from the legacy of the murders there, only to find herself dragged back when a new killing spree starts. Noah, meanwhile, would have visions of his slain girlfriend Zoe, talking with her about the murders and "the very nature of evil" in a manner indicating Sanity Slippage on his part. Brooke, also shaken by the murders, begins an affair with Audrey, creating a Love Triangle with her boyfriend Stavo. Kieran, the killer in season two, was supposed to live instead of getting killed off in the Halloween Special, and he would have been influencing the new killer and revealing how he and Piper committed their murders in a situation that Gans and Register compared to The Silence of the Lambs before eventually escaping from prison. Brandon James would still be alive and turn out to have been wrongly accused of the murders attributed to him (Gans and Register envisioned him as "a converse Michael Myers" in the sense of him being "a boogeyman who isn't a bad guy"), and would form a bond with Emma over their being linked to murder. As the season progressed, Characters Dropping Like Flies would have been in full effect as Ghostface knocked off multiple returning characters until only Emma was left as the Final Girl defeating Kieran for good...
    • ...only for the camera to pull back and reveal that everything we'd witnessed was a Show Within a Show as the cast, all playing themselves, congratulate each other on a job well done. At this point, Amadeus Serafini is himself killed by Ghostface, now sporting the original mask. Season four would have been about Willa Fitzgerald, John Karna, and Bex Taylor-Klaus battling a new "real-world" Ghostface, a Loony Fan of the Scream series who is out to murder everybody involved with it. That would have included cast members from the films, making for a meta crossover. This is what got their plan shot down by MTV, as they felt it would be a betrayal of the fans who'd grown attached to the characters.
    • Another idea that they had would have been to canon-weld with the movies by having the protagonists seek out Gale Weathers for advice.
• You Look Familiar: In the Brazilian Portuguese dub, Maggie Duval is voiced by Mônica Rossi, who had already dubbed over Gale Weathers in all the film sequels.

---