"Scream" Showrunners Reveal Scrapped Plans for 3rd and 4th Seasons

[JamesG]

"Scream" Showrunners Slash into the Unmade 3rd and 4th Seasons! [Exclusive]
by Jason Jenkins
March 18, 2022


This installment of Phantom Limbs finds us cutting into the intended third and fourth seasons MTV’s "Scream".

While the first two seasons of the film series-inspired television slasher followed one particular group of characters whose stories were left unresolved when MTV rebooted the series with the unrelated Scream: Resurrection, the initial plan was for the original cast to continue on through at least two more seasons, culminating in a surprising revelation that out-metas anything seen before in the entire franchise.

Joining us for this talk are Michael Gans and Richard Register, the showrunners of "Scream" Season 2, who will unveil their intentions for the show’s subsequent arcs, discuss the shocking twist which would have allowed for appearances from the cast of the Scream film series, and reveal why these additional episodes never came to pass.





In the wake of Season 2’s revelation that Kieran was the killer, the third season of "Scream" would have found Emma trying to escape her hometown and distance herself from the surviving members of the Lakewood 6 (Emma, Audrey, Noah and Brooke).

The infamy that the killings has brought the group has unnerved our heroine, inspiring a desire to reinvent herself and head off to college. Unfortunately, the murders start up again, dragging her back into Lakewood.





In the meantime, Noah is seeing ghostly visions of Zoe, the young woman he fell in love with in Season 2 before her untimely death. Noah and Zoe discuss the killings, the potential killers, and “the very nature of evil”.

This creates the concern that Noah may be losing his grip on reality, and that his conversations with Zoe may be “a ‘Son of Sam listening to his neighbor’s dog’ type situation”. Gans points out that “the question would be, ‘Was he mad, and had he killed everyone because of that?'”





Brooke begins losing her mind as well in the aftermath of Season 2. She and Audrey begin an affair, which sends her boyfriend Stavo spiraling.

As Gans and Register note in their pitch, “we wonder if these three – who are somehow clinging together in a three-way relationship – are somehow involved as a murdering trio … adding a third killer to the classic two-killer Scream legacy.”





While Kieran was murdered by an unknown assailant in a Brandon James mask in "Scream‘s" one-off Halloween special, the character was initially meant to live.

“We pitched this kind of Silence of the Lambs thing,” Gans reveals. “Someone was doing [the killings] at Kieran’s bidding, and the only person he would tell what was going on to was Emma. So she came in, and they had to sit face-to-face, and meanwhile people are being killed. So they’re in a race against time to stop this from happening, all the while she’s sitting with him.”

During these conversations, Kieran would reveal how he and Piper had pulled off all of the previous murders. “Juxtaposed with flashbacks of how it actually happened,” Register notes. Kieran would eventually escape from prison, becoming a threat to our heroes yet again.





Brandon James would also have been introduced in the story, being alive and well, “stalking our characters from the shadows”. He isn’t necessarily presented as a murderer, but he understand what it means to be inextricably linked to murder, which allows for a strange bond to form between he and Emma.

As the season would have barreled toward its conclusion, the killer would have started knocking off all of our favorite characters: Brooke, Stavo, Emma’s mother Maggie, Sheriff Acosta, and even Audrey.

“The audience would be losing their minds,” the pitch notes. “‘OHMYGOD, I can’t believe they’re killing everybody off!” During the two-part season finale, the last characters standing would have been Emma, Noah, and the escaped Kieran, all facing off with one another in an abandoned farmhouse just outside of Lakewood. Noah is killed, but Emma gets the drop on Kieran and finally kills him.”





Then, as Kieran is shown dead in a pool of his own blood – “CUT!”

Pull back to reveal that we’re on the set of Scream: The Television Series. The actors hug, and mentions of the wrap party are made. “The killer is killed,” Register says, “then we pull back [to reveal it’s a TV production]. Amadeus Serafini [the actor who plays Kieran] walks into his dressing room, and is killed again.”

For real, this time.





The 4th Season's pitch: “Willa Fitzgerald, Bex Taylor-Klaus and John Karna all track a real life version of the Lakewood 6 that was stolen and woven into the series by the desperate original writer.”

A killer in an original Ghostface mask, obsessed with the Scream franchise, would begin attacking various folks involved in the entire “Scream entertainment universe”, whether they’re writers, directors, producers, actors, etc.





And yes, this would have opened the door for actors from the original film franchise to make appearances on the show, guest starring as themselves, all as the cast of the Scream TV series would be attempting to determine who is behind this slate of real life murders as the body count continues to rise.

“The idea was to blow the walls off the television show and make it go super-meta,” Gans laughs. “That whole idea of that ending was that then you would pull out and then all of the Scream universe, the real Scream universe – the actual actors from it, and the writers, and the producers, and the crew who had made the original Scream movies were available to the story. The killer would have been someone who was obsessed with Scream who was stalking the cast.”





But was there ever the possibility of marrying the television and film universes, aside from the meta season they’d pitched? Gan explains that there was another in-canon crossover option that they’d considered.

“There was one version where there was a link [between the murders depicted in the show and the events of the film series], where they literally go to find Gale [Weathers, Courteney Cox’s character from the Scream film franchise] to ask about the murders. You’d go to the character.”





So why didn’t the original plan developed by Gans and Register come to fruition?

Gans explains: “The head of drama at MTV thought that the audience would feel that was a betrayal, because they had fallen in love with these characters. We said, ‘Well, we’re going to base the characters on the actors, who will be playing themselves-ish.’ So in a way, we would be giving them those characters maxed out. They will have come to know Willa Fitzgerald as Emma for two seasons, so it’s giving them ‘Super Emma.’ ‘The interior life revealed’ of Emma, or Noah, or whatever ‘X’ character. That’s how we saw it, because we have just a close relation to them.

And I think it’s true with Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox and David Arquette. We have a super deep relationship with them that has something to do with more than just the character they play in the movie, but who they are in reality. So that was where we had wanted to go with that next season.”

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