The Scream franchise has never exactly had a smooth ride. On the movie side, there’s Neve Campbell’s pay dispute that kept her out of Scream VI (she’s back for the seventh), Melissa Barrera being dropped after social media comments, and now a seventh film that’s reportedly bringing back everyone, including some of the dead. And then there’s the Scream TV series, which quietly carved out its own bloody corner of the franchise before MTV pulled the plug.
Running for three seasons between 2015 and 2019, the show went through more costume changes than Ghostface himself. The first two seasons aired on MTV with an entirely new cast and zero ties to the movies. Then came the rebranded third season, Resurrection, which shuffled networks over to VH1 and lasted just six episodes. If you closed your eyes for too long between all the screams, you probably missed it.
So why did the TV experiment end up in the graveyard? Tom Maden, who played Jake Fitzgerald in the first two seasons, recently sat down with Reel Appreciation hosts Maria Elizabeth Darnell and David Clair-Bennett to explain. His answer was blunt: “Um, I don’t know. I mean, MTV, you know, they don’t even do scripted television anymore. I think we were kind of on that cusp of cable television from channels that necessarily weren’t doing scripted shows, getting into scripted shows, then getting out of scripted shows. So, it kind of was part of the times.”
That “part of the times” excuse might sound vague, but Maden isn’t wrong. MTV was experimenting with scripted content back then. Teen Wolf, Awkward, and Scream all got a shot. But MTV quickly pivoted back to reality shows and music programming. By the time Scream Season 2 wrapped, the writing was on the wall. The show was shuffled to VH1, shelved for a year, and then aired as an afterthought.
Maden admitted the cancellation stung. “I was disappointed because there was an opportunity there for all kinds of fun stories to happen,” he said. And to be fair, the series wasn’t afraid to take risks. Willa Fitzgerald’s Emma was positioned as a fresh Final Girl who wasn’t a carbon copy of Sidney Prescott. Even the mask was redesigned. It divided fans, but it allowed the cast to step outside Wes Craven’s shadow.
Maden had high praise for Fitzgerald, who carried much of the first two seasons of the Scream TV series. “She came out of Yale drama where someone like Tom Hanks went to school. Um, so she was extremely professional, totally unsurprising that she’s working the way she is now. She really showed up, stepped up, you know, did her thing. So, um, it was it’s been really cool to watch her career flourish.”
Would he return if Scream: The TV Series somehow rose from the dead? Absolutely. “It would be awesome,” Maden said. He admitted he wasn’t even a horror fan before getting cast, but the dedication of the franchise’s fandom impressed him. “I would be really glad if it showed up because I know how many people love Scream.”
With Scream 7 currently under Kevin Williamson’s direction and scheduled for February 2026, the franchise is once again in uncharted territory. But if the movies can keep bouncing back, maybe the TV series isn’t as dead as it seems.
RELATED: Bryan Fuller Wants Silence of the Lambs Series With Zendaya & Mads Mikkelsen Returning As Hannibal
Discussion about this post