Editor’s Note: Story contains spoilers from the first episode of Scream Queens.
Liberal Ryan Murphy’s campy, horror-comedy show Scream Queens that premiered tonight is full of vile and heartless characters who humiliate, insult and even kill. However, the “queen” of them all is Chanel Oberlin (Chanel #1), president of the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority.
Scream Queens was created by Murphy along with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Murphy has often used his shows to attack conservatives, Catholics, and to promote promiscuity, and celebrate homosexuality and transgenderism. The same trio created Glee, a tv high school musical of sorts that constantly pushed the envelope on sexual issues including a “game-changing” episode celebrating one heterosexual and one homosexual couple losing their virginity. The show also mocked Christians. Murphy also co-created American Horror Story which was even worse, especially the season of AHS: Asylum which constantly derided Catholic nuns through sexual and sadistic content.
Now, in Scream Queens a GOP presidential candidate takes the first hit. As self-proclaimed “queen” of the sorority Oberlin spews venom, racism, elitism and raw hate against everyone. She calls her sorority clique her “minions” "sluts" and assigns them numbers (Chanel #2, Chanel #3, etc) because she doesn't know and doesn't care what their names are. Her professional dream is to be a "networks news anchor."
And of course, given Murphy’s political views, this vile and heartless creature is the daughter of Jeb Bush supporters.
She complains that her parents didn’t call her on her birthday “because they were too busy hosting a fundraiser for Jeb Bush.”
Obviously only parents who support a Republican could have raised such an evil daughter. If there’s any doubt about her lack of human decency, in the first episode she kills the housekeeper she called “White Mammy” by throwing her face in a deep fryer and forces everyone to keep it a secret. (It remained a mystery whether it was an accident or intentional cold-blooded murder).
Her indifference afterwards was evident when she claimed “Ms. Bean was a servant. She knew the risks.”
Scream Queens is set on the imaginary Wallace University campus where someone in a red devil costume is murdering people in the sorority. Kappa house and many others on the university campus (including the Dean) harbor dark secrets, but what wasn’t hiding was Murphy’s antagonism for Republicans, conservatives, “religious” people or the rich.
The portrayal of the political right was depicted again when potential sorority sisters were shown at a party talking about how they want to be Cindy McCain or Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly someday. Chanel #5 calls their role models "awesome."
When Grace, a new Kappa pledge who is joining to feel close to her dead mother, tells Chanel #1 she's an awful person, Chanel replies, "Maybe, but I’m rich and I’m pretty so it doesn’t really matter.”
The verbal jabs weren’t just at Republicans though. Grace’s freshman roommate says she was afraid she’d get some religious freak or a cutter for a roommate. Chanel #1 also nicknames one freshman pledge “Predatory Lez [as in lesbian].”
The killings on Scream Queens are sometimes grotesque, and sometimes campy (like the completely absurd killing of Chanel #2).
Chanel #1 is not the first Kappa president responsible for someone’s death. Twenty years earlier on the night of a Kappa party the president of the sorority refuses to get another sister to a hospital for medical care after she delivers a baby in the house. That sister and her friends insist on dancing to TLC’s “Waterfalls” before getting help and by the time they return, the sorority girl is dead -- although the baby is presumably still alive.
The star-studded cast includes Jamie Lee Curtis as Dean Cathy Munsch of Wallace University, Emma Roberts Chanel #1, Nick Jonas as frat boy Boone, Lea Michele as pledge Hester Ulrich, Abigail Breslin as Chanel #5, Ariana Grande as Chanel #2 and more. The cast of the show told TVLine that someone dies in every episode and all the characters have motive, making the mystery of who is dressing up as the red devil and killing people harder to unravel.
The show already was promoted by Today and earned high praise from E! Online, where Kristin Dos Santos called it her “favorite new show of the year.” However, The New York Times was more critical, saying “if the pilot is any indication, it’s essentially a comedy, one built on broad caricatures.” Variety also panned it as “too derivative.”
The characters are unbelievable not only in the way they behave but in the horrendous things they say. The most campy and absurd moment in the premiere was Chanel #2 texting with the red devil face to face even as he plunges a knife into her, and then crawling to her laptop to tweet that the red devil was killing her rather than trying to survive.
Chanel #1 may be the worst character, but many others are appalling too. The Dean, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, hates the sororities and Kappa in particular but she has sex with Chad, a popular frat boy, tells him he’s "awful in bed" and to go take a psychology course for his mommy issues. Although Chad claims to be “in love’ with her, Dean Munsch says aloud that she blackmails students on academic probation for sex.
Curtis told USA Today her character is a “feminist” who has “suffered the reality of what feminism really wrought.”
In an interview with TVLine, Curtis said about Scream Queens, “The thing about it that is so great is that Ryan and Brad and Ian, the writers, have created something that is a social statement about who we are as a society right now and what our priorities are or aren’t. And you know, it’s clothing and pop culture and it’s this amalgam of that set in the world of a sorority with this added thing that there’s a guy in a red devil mask kind of stalking this campus.”
Undoubtedly, Murphy will continue to use this show to promote his agenda, and Curtis suggested to TV Line. If his track record continues, that will mean more anti-conservative, anti-GOP and anti-Christian lines to come.
