4 years ago
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Shining reasons to bask in the shiny humor of this show.
If you feel overwhelmed by all the true-crime miniseries that have flooded streaming TV recently, you would love to bite into this pie of horror that has comedy filled inside. Starz's latest TV series, Shining Vale, is a delectable treat that will provide its consumers unmingled delight.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
It gives me ample pleasure to lay down 17 reasons before our esteemed readers that shall convince them to put Shining Vale on their entertainment roster.
1. Unlike Netflix, Starz doesn't dump the whole season at once. But Shining Vale, with all its episodes out of the basket, is a juicy comic fruit ripe for picking and binge-watching.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
With each episode only 30 minutes long, you would need not more than 4 hours to enjoy this 8-part tale of humorous horror.
2. Shining Vale focuses on a family that has recently moved to Connecticut from Brooklyn after the mother's brief dalliance with a man who came to fix her sink (and didn't even fix the sink).
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The family takes up residence in a sprawling & spooky mansion in a suburb called Shining Vale. Soon the wife starts seeing a woman and a little girl in the house.
3. The show's skeleton is made of horror that is blanketed by muscle fibers of raucous comedy.
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It sneaks in jump scares whilst bathing you with jokes. The show derives its hilarity from unexpected and mundane situations. The horror is intriguing and absorbing but never terrifying.
4. The show marks the return of comedy veteran, Courteney Cox, to scripted TV after a gap of seven years after the conclusion of Cougar Town. Cox is engrossed in the role of Pat Phelps, a frenetic and flustered wife who is juggling a strained marriage, impudent kids, mental disorder, and the constantly dangling sword of her upcoming book's deadline. And then there's a ghost to deal with.
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People looking to rediscover the joy of Cox in Friends, and Cougar Town shall be utterly pleased if they choose to watch this show.
5. Many actors worthy of adulation adorn the cast of the show.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
Oscar nominee Greg Kinnear, Merrin Dungey, Sherilyn Fenn, Judith Light, and Alysia Reiner constitute much of the cast. Gus Birney and Dylan Gage play the role of Phelps kids. Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino plays the role of the ghost haunting Pat.
6. The name of the show is a deliberate nod to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
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There are many Easter eggs in the show that wink at Kubrick's masterpiece: Pat Phelps swings an axe, she is a writer suffering from writer's block, she repeatedly types the same short sentences in her book's manuscript, etc. The scene in the beginning of Episode 4, where Pat asks Terry not to disturb her is lifted, with minor alterations, from The Shining. There are lots of such references that enhance the show's enjoyability.
7. The shows pays tribute to many other horror classics as well.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
Like Changeling (the yellow ball), Rosemary's Baby (the Phelps's kitchen is a replica of the kitchen in the movie, and as a direct homage, the ghost's name is Rosemary), and Double Indemnity.
8. It's totally unsurprising that the show has received unqualified acclaim with a 73% critics rating and 92% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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So, if a 73% score plants apprehensions in the deep recesses of your mind about the show's recreational potential, just know that almost all the viewers (including the writer of this piece) had fun watching it.
9. A show this funny is befitting of the comic minds it has emanated from. Sharon Horgan and Jeff Astrof, two commendable creators, birthed this series.
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Horgan is famous for creating Catastrophe, Pulling, and Divorce. Jeff Astrof is best known for producing Trial & Error, a show that spoofed documentaries. He was also a writer and executive story editor on Friends.
10. Courteney Cox is also the producer of the show, a fact that bolsters the comedic credentials of the show.
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The executive producers comprise Jeff Astrof, Dana Honor, Sharon Horgan, Aaron Kaplan, and Clelia Mountford.
11. The show's basic premise followed a theme embodied by Sharon Horgan's supposition: what if The Shining was a sitcom? It was after hearing that that Jeff Astrof became interested, and when he saw the quote about the mental health of women that opens the first episode of the show, he was totally on board.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
When Jeff Astrof pitched it to Warner Bros. they said that the statistic about women's mental health was demeaning and when Jeff told them that it was Sharon Horgan's idea they immediately greenlit it.
12. The plot details of the show arose from faux "real events" that Horgan and Astrof learned about in a meeting with one of the executive producers of the show, Aaron Kaplan.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
“He came to me and said that a friend of his had sort of pulled this prank on him where he sort of convinced him that the house that he used to live in had terrible atrocities that had taken place there, like a murder or, you know, murder-suicide or something,” Horgan informed TheWrap. “I was like, well, I like the idea of setting a comedy in a house where something terrible has happened and maybe the people [that] have moved in there — maybe it starts affecting them — and then I started thinking that it had to sort of be bigger than that, like the stakes have to be higher. And maybe it’s a woman who doesn’t know whether she’s losing her mind or whether the house is possessed or not. So it kind of came from there.”
13. Greg Kinnear got the script two months into COVID-19 and he decided to join the show because it made him laugh and stuff that could draw laughter from him were quite scarce at that time.
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It was also a sort of Friends reunion for him as he had made guest appearance in Friends Season 10.
14. At first, Horgan and Astrof didn't have any particular actor in mind for the role of Patricia Phelps.
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But one day, out of the blue, Astrof received a call from Cox (who was calling him after a gap of 25 years) and she expressed her strong desire in playing that role, which she felt was rich and layered.
15. For her scenes with Gus Birney, who plays the role of Pat's insolent daughter, Cox drew upon her own experiences with her teenage daughter which closely resembles the mother-daughter relationship the show portrays.
Kat Marcinowski / ©Starz / Courtesy Everett Collection
“I was so happy to be able to have a teenage daughter because I have one,” Cox said in an interview, “and I immediately connected with Gus [Birney] in every way, and the way she talks to me in the show is the way I get talked to at home.”
16. The show also draws attention to mental health issues in women which often get dismissed as wanton desire for attention or subdued by domestic and professional responsibilities.
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The show tries to make a connection between haunted women and female psychiatric patients. It makes viewers rethink all the possessed women and witches we have heard about and see them as victims of unaddressed mental disorders.
17. A major attraction of the show is Mira Sorvino who plays the role of the ghost, Rosemary. Her character has a mellifluous shell that reveals to have a menacing layer underneath. Although she doesn't have much screen time, her character strongly influences the events of the story.
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To prepare for her role, Sorvino watched some 50s sitcoms like “The Donna Reed Show”, “Leave It to Beaver”, and “Ozzie and Harriet”. To prepare for her ghostly role, she watched “The Postman Always Rings Twice" to add the glamour of a femme fatale to her character.
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