Shining Vale Review: You Can Ghost Courteney Cox's Haunted House Horror Comedy

Shining Vale opens with a typewritten title card, a cutesy Garamond prologue informing audiences that the symptoms of depression and the symptoms of possession are the same, and that each is twice as likely to affect women. This is everything you need to know about Shining Vale. It's not subtle. 

It's also a comedy, loosely, so the lack of subtlety is supposed to be part of the joke. The new series, airing Sundays on Starz, is a horror comedy about the terror of the nuclear family, with special attention to the agony of being a (straight, white) woman in American society. Courteney Cox, who also produces the show, stars as Pat Phelps, once the bestselling author of an erotic novel, now a depressed wife and mother who nearly blew up her marriage when she had an affair with the handyman. In a bid to save their relationship, Pat and her husband, Terry (Greg Kinnear), move the whole family — which also includes teenage daughter Gaynor (Dickinson's Gus Birney) and son Jake (Pen15's Dylan Gage) — from Brooklyn to a rickety old mansion in Connecticut. Who wants to bet that thing is haunted?

Sure enough, Pat starts having visions of people no one else can see. The most talkative is Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), a sly 1950s housewife dressed to the nines who appoints herself Pat's toxic muse. Pat is a recovering alcoholic who's 17 years sober, but she's also desperate to write her next book, and communing with Rosemary becomes her new addiction. As the antidepressants she's prescribed get more powerful, Pat gives herself over to Rosemary's influence and finds herself writing a raunchy page-turner that her editor (Merrin Dungey) loves. Her family suffers for her art, but Pat can't quit until she gets the hit novel she wants.

Is Pat depressed, or is she being haunted by an actual spirit? Yes. That's not a spoiler; critics were sent seven episodes of the eight-episode season, so if the finale comes down on one side or the other, I don't know yet. But it's clear from the title card that the events of this series are meant to be understood on two levels. This woman's demons are both literal and figurative. You could describe a lot of great horror that way. The problem is that you could also describe a lot of bad horror that way, and Shining Vale is too transparent to be clever. 

6.0

Shining Vale

at Starz

Like

• The cast is great
• The haunted house gets more fun as the show goes along

Dislike

• Humor falls flat
• The horror is derivative
• The show's take on marriage is totally uninspired

Shining Vale was co-created by Jeff Astrof, co-creator of NBC's underrated sitcom Trial & Error, and Sharon Horgan, whose Catastrophe was endlessly warm and sharp about how strange it is to build a family with someone. So it's surprising that Shining Vale is so shrill about married life. Even as Terry guilts Pat for her affair, he's inching closer to one of his own, and neither parent seems to care much about their boy-chasing daughter or the son whose eyes are permanently glued to his phone. The show's take on the trap of the American nuclear family feels especially hollow given this family's race and class and their cavernous new home (even if they did have to pour their life savings into it). Rather than satirize the privilege underpinning the Phelpses' midlife crisis, the show plays their unhappiness straight, never acknowledging that as trapped as Pat is, she's got more options than her Black female editor would in her shoes, or their Asian neighbor (Susan Park) whose last name is inexplicably treated like a joke. 

Horror and comedy don't play well together in Shining Vale. The show wants it to be OK that it's formulaic, because that's the gag: It's doing a horror homage as a bit. But in practice, the two sides of the show cannibalize each other; the horror isn't original enough to be truly scary, but it's usually not playful enough to be funny, either. The setup sounds like the start of a standup routine — What if a woman whose house was haunted had to take the dog out to do her business in the middle of the night? — but the punchline never comes. I laughed at lines in the trailer that I didn't laugh at in context, and I watched them in context first. Shining Vale has a sense of humor, but it's too often lost in dull editing.

Everything interesting about this show is buried in its backyard. (I'm being metaphorical, but I'm also being literal. Evidence of a crime is buried in the woods behind the house, but the show refuses to let itself become a murder mystery.) Judith Light shows up midway through the season as Pat's mother, who was institutionalized and overmedicated for a lot of vaguely defined mental health issues. Light is great, injecting the show with more chaos and pain than it gets from anyone else, but her story isn't pointed enough to draw blood. The show wants to protest the ways women are punished for their desires and dismissed when they need help. Instead, it demonizes mental illness (literally), while also glorifying mental illness as a necessity for great art.

This isn't new territory for horror, but comparisons don't do Shining Vale a lot of favors. Showtime's Penny Dreadful did the terror of women's repression already, and its teeth were sharper. Paramount+'s Evil, like Shining Vale, has Exorcist references, a cool blond grandma, and a creepy girl in a pair of AR goggles. But Evil expertly balances the high wire between literal demonic possession and metaphorical oppression, all with a killer sense of humor and a heightened social awareness that Shining Vale lacks. In its bluntness, Shining Vale reminded me of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House, another series about a troubled family whose fears manifested themselves in their haunted home. Hill House was a blast until its final hours, when it started hitting its metaphors with a hammer. Shining Vale picks up that hammer right away, and by the time it tries to add some nuance to the story, it's too late. 

Maybe I'm too late to say this in the eleventh hour of this review, but Shining Vale is not a total wash. Nothing with a cast this good can be. The series gets more entertaining, and the characters get more interesting, as people other than Pat begin to spiral into their own crises. Sorvino gives a decadently fun performance as Rosemary, whose smooth assertiveness clashes well with Cox's frenzied desperation. It's just that the mystery surrounding Rosemary is teased out too slowly, leaving the show to get distracted by basic family drama. Good bones can only take this haunted house so far.

Premieres: Sunday, March 6 at 10:21/9:21c on Starz
Who's in it: Courteney Cox, Greg Kinnear, Mira Sorvino, Gus Birney, Dylan Gage
Who's behind it: Jeff Astrof (co-creator/EP), Sharon Horgan (co-creator/EP) 
For fans of: The Haunting of Hill House with some jokes
How many episodes we watched: 7 out of 8