Shining Vale review: Courteney Cox is scary good in Starz horror-comedy

A fresh start brings fresh hell for a tormented writer in Shining Vale, the randy and wry horror-com from Jeff Astrof (Trial & Error) and Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe). Though this gender-swapped homage to The Shining struggles to land on a consistent tone, it's a welcome showcase for Courteney Cox, back for her first series since Cougar Town.

Novelist Pat Phelps (Cox) and her husband, Terry (Greg Kinnear), think relocating their family to a cobwebby mansion in Shining Vale, Connecticut, will be just what their struggling marriage needs. Back in Brooklyn, a depressed Pat had a fling with the couple's handyman (Jonathan Higginbotham). Terry's still trying to push through his anger, and the Phelps kids are disengaged in their own way: Sneery, boy-crazy Gaynor (Dickinson's Gus Birney) is determined to seduce the cute, religious neighbor (Derek Luh), and perpetually awkward Jake (Dylan Gage) only makes eye contact with his VR headset.

Pat, meanwhile, is stuck at home trying to finish the sequel to her 17-year-old hit — an erotic romance novel called Cressida Unbound — before her agent, Kam (Merrin Dungey, divinely dry), drops her as a client. Rambling around the creepy, cavernous house, Pat keeps hearing noises — music, footsteps, tapping — and having run-ins with the specter of a glamorous, '50s-era housewife named Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), who seems eager to help Pat write her book. It's all terribly traumatizing, especially for a woman whose own mother, the button-pushing Joan (Judith Light, national treasure), had a psychotic break years ago. But Pat finds herself doubted and dismissed at every turn: Terry thinks she's imagining things; her therapist (James M. Connor) thinks she just needs more Clonazepam; and Kam thinks Pat should just embrace the crazy because "artists work best when they're battling their demons."

Horgan and Astrof have described their series (premiering March 6 on Starz) as a comedic take on The Shining, and they craft some playfully on-point spoofs of key scenes from Stanley Kubrick's classic. (Pat goes full Jack Torrence after Terry interrupts her writing: "When you hear me typing, or talking, or whatever the f--- you hear me doing up here, it means I'm working, so don't come in!") But horror comedies, especially on TV, are rare for a reason; it's hard to make scary things funny, and vice versa. Shining Vale is creepy at times, and there are some decent jump scares, but it never delivers real horror — at least, not in the seven episodes (out of eight) made available for review.

The show can be quite funny, though. Kinnear puts his brand of peppy exasperation to good use as the cuckolded Terry, who stubbornly smothers his feelings of resentment and emasculation with relentless positivity. He and Cox are perfectly matched as harried marrieds, and Shining Vale shines the most when Pat and Terry wrangle over their relationship troubles. ("It was a one-time event," says Pat of her affair. "An event?" Terry sputters back. "What, like a Toyotathon?") It should surprise no one but Emmy voters when I say that Cox remains a comedy master, nailing every punchline with expert timing and easy flair.

Pat is the type of sharp-wit-as-defense-mechanism role that Cox excels at, but she's also a deeply depressed woman — and the actress is equally affecting in her character's melancholy moments. "A man gets depressed, and he gets to work through it," gripes Pat. "A woman has an emotion and she's treated like a mental patient." Even when the laughs don't land in Shining Vale, it's a pleasure to watch Cox as this fierce, funny embodiment of misunderstood and maligned female "hysteria." Grade: B

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