Warning: Contains spoilers for the first episode of Scare Tactics (2024)
TV has brought audiences so many prank shows over the decades that it’s possible to name superlatives. Jackass: most violent. Betty White’s Off Their Rockers: most senior citizens. Punk’d: most celebrities. Jury Duty: most elaborate. The Magic Prank Show: most magical. USA’s Scare Tactics revival already had a premise baked in, but not only does it fail to be most horrifying; it also left me wondering whether entertainment has evolved beyond the need for new prank shows entirely.
Given that what made it to air never looked, let’s say, particularly cost-intensive, the Scare Tactics franchise — a hidden-camera show in which ordinary people are the marks for terrifying pranks with names like “Laboratory Meltdown” and “Orgy From Hell” — has gone through multiple eras and homes. It premiered on what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003. Shannen Doherty was the first of its several hosts, succeeded midway through the second season by Stephen Baldwin, with Tracy Morgan taking over starting with the third. After its original run ended in 2013, the property lay in wait for a while, like a serial killer in one of its own pranks. Prolific horror studio Blumhouse announced plans in 2017 to revive it, but in true slasher-movie style, just when we all thought Scare Tactics was dead, it roared back to life in July with the news that Jordan Peele was producing a new season at USA Network.
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Peele has directed three feature films in the horror genre — Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and Nope (2022). Even before those, he starred in and wrote on the Comedy Central sketch series Key & Peele, in which every season that aired episodes in October included one made up entirely of horror parodies. Peele also produced and hosted a revival of the horror-adjacent anthology series The Twilight Zone in 2019, but acting as MC evidently wasn’t something he felt the need to repeat this time. Instead of Peele (or Stephen Baldwin) introducing segments, we get Flip, “the dark prince of pranking.” A teen kid with a television for a head, Flip complains that TV’s gotten too boring, then explains the show’s genesis: “You know what I like? Scary movies. So I was thinking: What if I use my unlimited, borderline godlike powers to make a few horror movies? I take ordinary people … and drop them right into some terrifying scenarios of my own creation.”
If the idea behind Flip is to turn him into a sassy CryptKeeper type, that doesn’t really land in the one episode provided to critics to screen; the rationale for going this far to personify what could have been a disembodied narrator isn’t clear. Admittedly, we’re only one episode in, but: if not now, when?
A show like this is only as good as the improv actors tasked to perform the prank scenarios, and these ones (whose names I regret I can’t share, since the screener doesn’t have a credits sequence) are very good. They’re essentially putting on an immersive theater experience for the one prank target who doesn’t understand the situation, so they have to start out by acting normal enough not to arouse suspicion, while peppering in hints of craziness to come, and finding ways to play to the hidden cameras so that the home viewer will be entertained. They also have to leave room to heighten the premise for the eventual climax and reveal.
Across the premiere’s two pranks, the same strawberry blonde woman plays the role of a heavily pregnant bride having a quickie wedding witnessed by strangers (the mark and his friend) before her baby is born; then a diner harshly disciplined at a fancy but highly secretive restaurant for hiding her phone — which she was supposed to give up for the meal — so that she could take a few sneaky photos of the dishes. This gifted yet, as of this writing, anonymous woman may not break out from Scare Tactics the way Dax Shepard did from Punk’d, but if it were up to me, she’d go on, like him, to parlay movie and network TV stardom into a wildly successful podcast no one you know actually listens to.
The degree to which you will get on board with this prank show depends on your personal tolerance for one setup in which a Little Person is made to play a demon baby who races at full speed out of his cursed mother’s womb and chases the mark to his car; and one in which an elaborate tasting menu ends with a serving of “long pig” — a human, possibly named Russell, who died 12 days before ending up on rapturous restaurant patrons’ plates.
Even if you don’t think either of these premises lies outside the bounds of good taste (no pun intended), you might find yourself, as I did, questioning how pranked these marks actually are. I understand that these situations are produced to keep marks in a psychological state such that they ignore their natural instincts to flee once, for example, a very nervous-looking priest transitions from the usual wedding script to verses in a ritual that the prank target is expected to recite along with him. But when the restaurant chef comes out to share the farm-to-table story of how the “long pig” came to be served, and he’s played by Baron Vaughn — a stand-up comic and actor who was a series regular on Grace & Frankie for nearly 100 episodes — I can’t help suspecting that Erving the mark may have figured out what was going on before he decides, with a shrug, to try his first helping of human flesh. (At least…I hope it was his first — but if not, I guess that’s another explanation for why he had no compunction about eating it this time.)
I didn’t buy it when booked-and-busy character actor Kirk Fox didn’t get recognized, by face if not name, when he played “Pat McCurdy” in Jury Duty, and I don’t buy this either.
Even if you grant that the monoculture has been sufficiently fragmented for even actors with 20 years’ worth of credits to convince ordinary people they’re extremely avant-garde chefs, there’s also the fact that the number of pranks anyone might be subjected to on a given day has skyrocketed with the advent of pranks turning into trends online. Sports Illustrated and the New York Times are reporting on social media pranks as though they were actually news. So when a person who, seemingly by pure chance, ends up in a weird situation, maybe Scare Tactics isn’t the first thing they think of, but “this is some TikTok nonsense” might be, and that just makes the supposedly credulous reception the marks give the premiere’s pranks that much harder to buy into for the viewer.
Personally, I could do with a lot fewer pranksters trying to sell ill-considered and mean-spirited jokes, and a lot more “illusions” like those of TikTokers siegfriedandjoy, whose comedic magic must be seen to be believed. But then again, maybe intentionally fake illusions are what Peele was actually aiming for, and the biggest prank is the one he pulled on NBC Universal by getting them to pay him for this show.
