Starz's Shining Vale is oddly insightful for a horror-comedy series that isn't scary or funny

The Hollywood Reporter

"Comedies require visceral laughter and horror requires visceral unease, and it’s hard enough to evoke one or the other, much less achieve a simultaneous balance," says Daniel Fienberg of the Starz series starring Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear. "For its first couple of episodes, Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan’s horror-comedy Shining Vale on Starz doesn’t work on either front. And as it proceeds, it still doesn’t quite find anything spooky or particularly hilarious. But the show does find a sharply satirical undercurrent, critiquing modern female domesticity in a way that grows increasingly pointed, locating a sort of sweet spot between The Shining and The Stepford Wives."

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• Shining Vale is as funny as it is chilling: "What’s more surprising about Shining Vale is how it ably counterbalances the writing’s comedic throughline with genuinely creepy touches of horror that might feel familiar to fans of the earlier, most effective seasons of American Horror Story," says Caroline Framke, adding that "Shining Vale has a honed sense of humor, usually (and especially) when it’s least expected."
• Shining Vale is a middling horror comedy rehash: "Shining Vale is less a horror comedy than a show with the illusion of both horror and comedy," says Steve Greene. "Rather than weave together its swirling ideas about family and regret and the fact that teen boys often smell bad, Shining Vale exists as a series of bits and nods to other stories that better pull off that combination of jokes and jumps." Greene adds that the "darker part of the show seems just as forced. There’s a frenetic energy to Shining Vale that isn’t so much the product of getting into the headspace of a family in turmoil but a show that feels adrift between trying to set up fraught parent-child interactions and then stumbling on the house’s skeletons (metaphorical and otherwise). When it’s not undercutting every single moment of tension for a laugh, it’s reverting to easy stings to try and drum up even the slightest bit of dread."
• Shining Vale has interesting ideas, but sluggish pacing: "There’s so much overlong TV out there in the streaming era, but the Starz horror-comedy Shining Vale has to be one of this year’s most damning, counter-intuitive examples," says Nick Allen. "Because it needs to take up so much running time, its few good ideas about characters, alive and dead, lose much of their impact. And while the series achieves a lighthearted gothic tone to match the haunted house it mostly takes place in, both its horror and comedy are used cheaply. Courteney Cox nonetheless gives an energetic performance plays Pat, an author experiencing a bonafide midlife crisis."
• Shining Vale isn't funny or scary, but it is enjoyable: "Ultimately, Shining Vale wants to be a horror-comedy, but doesn’t go hard enough into either genre," says Alyse Wax. "The horror could easily be darker and scarier, without actually changing the vibe of the show. It almost feels like creators Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan were afraid to lean too heavily into the promising horror aspects baked into the series' very premise. Luckily, the characterizations by a talented cast are enough to draw you in and keep you entertained, even if Shining Vale's genre trappings leave a lot more to be desired."
• Shining Vale wrings frights and laughs from generations of feminine ideals: The best scary stories find their frights in real-life fears, and the genre is rich with ones that explore the feminine grotesque—Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby come to mind," says Cristina Escobar. "Shining Vale brings humor to that equation, both laughing at and dramatizing the scary aspects of gender norms. The result is a show that’s smart enough to keep viewers guessing as it pokes fun at modern society, its characters, and even its audience."
• Shining Vale blends together into a bit of a strange brew, but it does feel like the natural brainchild of its two creators: "One half of the show is a kooky, irreverent comedy that skews genre tropes, just like Astrof's previous true crime-lampooning series, Trial and Error," says Valerie Ettenhoffer. "The other half is an introspective yet cutting story about marriage, aging, and womanhood that's in line with Horgan's work on the always-honest sitcom Catastrophe. The result is a one-of-a-kind series that's often messy but always entertaining."
• It's a pleasure to watch Courteney Cox as this fierce, funny embodiment of misunderstood and maligned female "hysteria": "Pat is the type of sharp-wit-as-defense-mechanism role that Cox excels at," says Kristen Baldwin, "but she's also a deeply depressed woman — and the actress is equally affecting in her character's melancholy moments."
• Greg Kinnear believes Shining Vale filmed in a haunted house: "The original house that we shot in was owned by an elderly woman whose husband had died — they'd been together for 70 years or something and she was convinced that he was still in the house," Kinnear explains. "And the house was large and dark. It was South Pasadena. We shot a lot of nights and it definitely had an ooga booga quality to it, I would say."
• Why Courteney Cox was drawn to Shining Vale: "When I read it, I just loved this character and everything that she was, and everything that she goes through and what she's been through—going through a midlife crisis and having an affair and starting your life over," she says. "Everybody thinks that she's losing it and yet something is happening to her. She's so stuck and unhappy and she wants things to be better. But she's got the teenage daughter who's really on her all the time, or pushing her away all the time. So just themes that I understand. Even talking to Jeff about where it was going and what to play. This is the most layered character I've had in years and years and years. So I didn't want to just rely on my instincts. I worked with an acting coach who I adore and really wanted to give it my all."
• Cox loved Shining Vale's blend of the serious and lighthearted: “It’s really heavy issues, and they’re real,” says Cox. “She’s not being believed when she sees a ghost for the first time and it’s just so frustrating…It’s an honest topic in every way. When you are the age that she is, it’s what people go through.” But the comedic aspect, she says, allows the scarier stuff to go down easier. “I love the comedy of it. I just love everything about this show: I love the sparring between me and Greg, and I love that it’s a half-hour – that’s just right up my alley. I have the attention span of hummingbird!”