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Fox’s new mystery murder TV series stars A-list cast

What do you get when you mix “Mean Girls” with “Pretty Little Liars?” A TV show that Entertainment Weekly rated a B+ and has this television junkie absolutely obsessed.
“Scream Queens” is FOX’s new series, starring Emma Roberts, Skyler Samuels, Jamie Lee Curtis, Keke Palmer and the laundry list of A-list stars that goes on and on. The show takes place at Wallace University where the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority house has a very dark history. President of Kappa, Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts) is the Regina George of the sorority and Chanel No. 2 (Ariana Grande), Chanel No. 3 (Billie Lourd), and Chanel No. 5 (Abigail Breslin) are her minions.
In this horror comedy, Chanel is forced by the university’s dean of students, Cathy Munsch (Jamie Lee Curtis), to allow any and all girls interested in pledging Kappa
due to her strong hatred for the Greek community, even “fatties and ethnics,” as Chanel calls them. During the time of “Hell Week”, a.k.a. pledging week, an unknown killer in the school’s mascot uniform knocks off pledges and sisters one by one, leading the sorority house to go under investigation for the murders.
During the pilot episode of the show, it is 1995 and Kappa Kappa Tau is hosting the “greatest party of the semester.” A pledge mysteriously dies in an upstairs bathroom in the Kappa house after giving birth. Many pop culture references are creatively hidden throughout the episode such as when a security guard (Niecy Nash) is hired by the national president of KKT to protect the sisters. She lists all the ineffective ways she’s prepared to protect the Kappa House, she’s winking at the self-aware genre comedy of “Scream.” Chanel’s archenemy, nice girl Grace (Skyler Samuels), has a makeout scene set to the closing song from “Sixteen Candles.” And, just like in “Heathers,” all
the Kappa sisters have the same name: aforementioned Chanel No. 2, Chanel No. 3, and ChanelNo. 5.
At times, it’s hard to tell if “Scream Queens” is satirizing “Mean Girls” or acting like a mean girl itself. The most interesting characters are the misfit pledges: Grace, her black roommate Zayday (Keke Palmer), a deaf woman named Tiffany (Whitney Meyer), the neck-braced Hester (Lea Michelle), the lesbian “Predatory Lez” (Jeanna Han) and Jennifer (Breezy Eslin), a “candle vlogger” who reviews candles on YouTube. These women get all the best one-liners, and they also serve up the smartest metacommentary about race, gender, sexuality and class, which might make you assume that the show sides with these so-called losers.
According to EW’s review of the show, “Creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuck, and Ian Brennan created ‘Glee,’ a show so insistent upon its love of nerds and outcasts that it literally aired antibullying.
But with its sharp wit and rat-atat dialogue, ‘Glee’ sometimes sounded like it was longing to laugh at these nerds as often as it laughed along with them. Such outright spitefulness wouldn’t have fit the show’s warm-fuzzy message, but on ‘Scream Queens,’ that’s no longer a problem. The over-the-top violence and comedy allow the writers to unleash their evil dialogue. Case in point: Chanel No. 1 greets Kappa’s recruits by barking, ‘Good evening, idiot hookers!’” Of course, this show might not be for everybody whit its stereotype of a sorority or the gore and blood shown almost every 10 minutes of the episode, but it most certainly has those WTF moments that will have you on the edge of your seat and awaiting the next episode.
Two more episodes lined up until Oct. 13: “Haunted House” will kick off the month of October with its premiere on the 6th, and “Pumpkin Patch” will follow on the 13th. You can find these episodes on
FOX.

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