Faking It!

So MTV has been getting pretty darn good at this TV thing lately, it seems. Not a huge surprise, while they did invent reality tv, which I've never been especially fond of, they also had some of the best shows of my youth like Daria and Aeon Flux (and Undressed -- at least when I was eleven years old!)

So they came out with this show called Faking It, which I found out about completely randomly on youtube. I was curious, but skeptical. Luckily it showed up for free on Amazon Prime so I gave it a shot.

First episode, I still had some trepidation. I was like... There has to be some catch, something more to this. I mean if this is really a show about two straight girls pretending to be gay... then this is not something I'm going to be watching.

But, of course, in the last second of the first episode you find out one of the fakers, weeelll, she might be having a pretty easy time faking it.

And it pretty much gets better each episode. It feels a little like MTV's other hit romance romp, Awkward. Faking It isn't as funny or clever as Awkward, but I'd have to say that the characters on Faking It are a lot more sympathetic. Jenna on Awkward is just a straight up bad-ass. Everyone around her is crazy as fuck and that gets her into 'awkward' situations, but she herself isn't awkward. She's smart and collected and basically ready to take on all comers. So I mean, I root for her but I don't exactly relate to her -- I'm nowhere near as cool as she is.

Faking It gives us characters that are a little more flawed and a little more down to Earth. I mean, I'm not as cool as Amy either. But she's more conflicted. And even the evil popular girl -- confounded by her inability to lord over the school because of the school's inverse social structure that puts outcasts on top and barbies at the bottom -- even she ends up being pretty sympathetic.

I thoroughly enjoyed Awkward's first two or three seasons but the premise has run thin for me with all the constant back and forth between Guy A, Guy B, or Guy C. Faking It hopefully has a better plan for us. But even if it only lasts 18 episodes, it'll be a whirlwind knockout of a show. I'm curious where they intend to go with this set-up and I'm hoping it turns out to be a classic best-friend romance, we haven't seen that in a long time. At least not on TV.

I'm up to episode 6 of a disturbingly short 8 episode season, and #6 was the best so far. I mean, in most cases the whole threesome concept is thrown into a TV show as a lowest common denominator appeal to male fantasy. But gosh, the version in Faking It was fiendishly nerve-wracking in such a unique way. Imagine you're pretending to be in a relationship with your best friend who you are secretly in love with, and you're tasked with, um... pretending to have sex with this friend but you really want to have sex with her so you have to... pretend to pretend to have sex with her? That's an Oscar-worthy performance if you can pull that one off!

So, way to go MTV. I'm looking forward to finishing this season and I can't wait for next season of Faking It. I also can't wait for Finding Carter's season to end so I can watch that. But I still can't get into Teen Wolf. It's like a not-as-good version of The Vampire Diaries which I already gave up on in the third season. But I'm sure there's something great about it which I'm just not seeing.

New Series: Finding Carter

Escalation. We wear kevlar, they use armor-piercing rounds.

As you know if you read my blog, Switched at Birth roundly raised the bar on what kind of depth is required to compete in the world of good teen drama. The formerly ubiquitous 'rich teens behaving badly' motif has been replaced by sexy vampires and sexy werewolves. So to keep apt against such flashy aesthetics, grounded teen dramas had to fight back with the only recourse left to them: conceptual depth. Switched At Birth brought us all the dependable necessities of young love and parental showdowns, but with a complex family life and a unique cast of characters.

Earlier this week, MTV debuted a program which invites instant parallels to Switched at Birth. They both bring to life an extremely unique familial situation where a child is torn between more than one set of parents.

MTV's Finding Carter introduces us to a girl who was kidnapped as a young toddler, and then raised as her own by the kidnapper. At age 16, young Carter (real name: Linden) finds out everything she remembers about her entire life is a lie. In one fell swoop her entire world is taken from her, her "mother" is on the run from the law, and she's thrust against her will into a family of strangers. Now she struggles with her burgeoning feelings for her biological family, while refusing to let go of her love for the woman that raised her.

This is the kind of scenario that I, as a TV fan, dream of witnessing. A direct correlation where one great show inspires another. So far, Finding Carter seems to effortlessly walk that thin line where the influence is obvious, but the new material is genuine and legitimate without even the slightest hint of rehash.

Those first two episodes of Finding Carter were so fucking fantastic, almost 'next-level' shit. It fills my eternal soul with anguish that I can't watch the whole first season right now. This week to week thing, damn you terrestrial TV and your outdated, 1950s ways. Why couldn't this have been a Netflix series? If I want to watch this show properly, I'll have to wait until the season is done before I can watch the next episode!

While you can't possibly compare 2 great episodes to 40 great episodes fairly, I haven't rolled out the possibility that Finding Carter could be even better than Switched at Birth. And in any case, if this proliferation goes any further, we'll have undoubtedly entered the golden age of teen dramas. There have been so many amazing shows that have come before, but this new class of teen drama brings in a quantifiably more complex emotional dynamic that is highly difficult to usurp.

Scream TV

The never ending franchise is a staple of horror. Nearly any profitable series is reiterated ad nauseam until even the hardcore fans refuse to shell out the cash for direct-to-video dime store sequels. There are seven Saw films and that series only began 8 years ago! Meanwhile the acclaimed and profitable Scream series, which is twice as old as Saw, has racked up a mere four installments. Perhaps this is for the best, considering quality control issues. For example, legendary director Wes Craven was able to direct all four Scream films, meanwhile he wrote and/or directed a mere two films out of the nine Nightmare on Elm Street installments, a series which he himself invented.

With the release of Scream 4, it momentarily seemed Scream was finally poised to repeat ad infinitum like franchises oft do, with a fifth and sixth film in the works. I would have been delighted to see this come to pass, but unfortunately Scream 4 performed below financial expectations. So while the idea of more Scream sequels is not completely off the table yet, it seems unlikely, and there has been no movement towards that goal thus far.

The latest news on new Scream content (albeit 4 months old), is that MTV is developing a TV series based on Scream.

For many people this may seem a strange fit. But as an obsessive TV nerd with a finger on the pulse of the times, I'd say a Scream series makes a goddamn lot of good sense right about now. Scream is three things: horror, mystery, and snarky satire.

•  Horror television serials (i.e. not anthologies) are in the midst of their most powerful boom of all-time, with the resounding success of The Walking Dead, Dexter, True Blood, American Horror Story, and The Vampire Diaries. 

• Likewise, darkly cool teen mysteries have recently become a big hit, in the form of ABC Family's Pretty Little Liars and Nickelodeon's House of Anubis. 

• Meanwhile, snarky satire has remained one of the driving forces in television since the dawn of the 90s, look no further than Archer, Family Guy, The Office, and 30 Rock to witness its enduring popularity. Mind you, those shows have very little in common with Scream per se', but the recent smash hit The Cabin In The Woods has quite a bit in common with Scream, thus proving that a new horror satire would be very timely and potentially lucrative. 

• Scream is also a series, at its heart, about serial killers, and with the success of Dexter many new serial killer TV shows are in the works, including an NBC show based on Hannibal Lecter, and FOX's The Following (more on that in a minute). 

So clearly this is a pretty great idea they have, to make a Scream TV series. Now all that remains is how they're going to put it together, and whether they'll do it well. I imagine something along the lines of each season having a different static collection of Ghostfaces; probably just two like the films, but maybe three or four since there's more space to work with, certainly no more than that. Having a new killer every episode or every few episodes would be overkill in more ways than one (pun intended). I imagine the mystery unfolded maybe over the length of each season, and then starting relatively fresh next season.

I don't think the original cast should be brought into the series, not that they're likely to sign on anyway. Ghostface is an icon that anyone, anywhere can utilize, that's part of the point. There's no reason every deranged horror-watching revenge-seeker should seek out Sidney Prescott, that was more of a plot device to carry the plot across the film series. It's every bit as plausible for the TV series to feature brand new characters. After all, everyone knows Ghostface from the "Stab" franchise.

The most important thing they absolutely should retain from the original series, is writer/creator Kevin Williamson. The man is every bit as much a TV auteur as he is one of film, with his shows Dawson's Creek and The Vampire Diaries being just as important as his Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer films. So a Scream TV series without Kevin Williamson? That just plain doesn't make logical sense. Another writer might be able to handle the series if we're very lucky, but nothing could insure both the show's genuine legitimacy, and its dependable brilliance, like bringing in Kevin Williamson.

Tragically, Kevin Williamson is more than likely deposed at the moment. In addition to his work on the continuingly-successful Vampire Diaries, he also has created a brand new show on FOX called The Following. Wouldn't you know it, it's a show about a serial killer. Why didn't FOX commission a Scream series instead? We can only wonder, especially considering The Following sounds like an awful police procedural that is doomed to fail almost immediately. The premise for The Following sounds kind of fucking stupid (sorry Kevin W., you know I worship the ground you walk on and consider you one of media's all-time geniuses, but this show just isn't going to work.) It's about serial killers cooperating together under the influence of one mastermind killer, and the cliche' group of FBI agents who are trying to track him down.

Depressingly, FOX has deeper pockets than MTV. So a battle between The Following and a hypothetical "MTV's Scream" would almost certainly end in FOX's favor, regarding Kevin's allegiances. But, if it's all we can get, I'm perfectly happy with accepting a Scream series under a different author. There's always the possibility Kevin could come aboard later in the series' run, if it gets that far.

So, the only link in this puzzle that worries me now is MTV. There are literally a dozen stations I would feel much more comfortable with in creating a Scream TV series.

The CW's proven they can handle horror with the gorgeously gothic and genuinely violent Vampire Diaries, a Kevin Williamson show no less! SyFy Channel may be bad at most things, but their brooding adaption of Being Human at least shows they could make a Scream series that is properly serious. FX seems like the ideal station to air a Scream series by virtue of their penchant for stylish and gorey drama, most notably the brilliant American Horror Story. I drool to imagine the joys that could come from AMC spearheading the series and giving us a Walking Dead-calibur A++ horror masterpiece. And in the era of Dexter, I'm surprised HBO or Showtime wouldn't want to pick up on Scream's venerable legacy and put together an artisan show without having to give up one ounce of the original films' blood or nudity. Even ABC Family has proven they can create a dark, mysterious flavor through the ocassional grim flourish in The Secret Circle and Pretty Little Liars.

But, MTV? Admittedly I've only watched a few episodes of Teen Wolf, but it didn't strike me as capturing the darkness necessary for Scream. It's not a horror show, it's just supernatural, like Charmed or Buffy. I don't have anything remotely against MTV, Awkward is one of the best shows on television. There's no question that MTV can match the hip sarcasm and referential humor which is part and parcel of Scream, but I remain unconvinced that they can create a decent horror series. They're just too glib of a station. And do you know what you get when you subtract the horror from Scream? You get Scream 3, resoundingly the worst of the series. And if it should come to pass that Kevin Williamson isn't in the writer's seat (which is quite likely), add that to MTV's hypothetical inability to create a horrific atmosphere and worse than Scream 3, you're going to be verging on Scary Movie territory. I shudder to imagine.

But there's always the chance that they can impress me and put together something as sadistic and brutal as the original Scream. Who knows, maybe Wes Craven could even be convinced to direct (not likely). I'll remain enthusiastic and hopeful indefinitely

Honestly, I doubt this series will ever reach fruition. But if it does you can damn well bet I will be the figurative 'first in line' to watch it. Even if it does suck, I'd love to see it happen just to see how it pans out and how they try to put it together. It'd be very interesting if nothing else.