Shining Vale Creators Open up About Capturing the Spirit of the Ambitious New Series

The new STARZ series Shining Vale covers a lot of ground over the course of its narrative, dealing with heavily dramatic topics like substance abuse and relationship issues, while also finding ways to look at the lighter side of even the darkest of subjects. Add to that the fact that the series unfolds in a seemingly haunted location, Shining Vale delivers audiences a number of compelling elements to excite a variety of fans. Creators Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan recently weighed in on their approach to the series and how they managed to stick with a consistent and compelling tone. Shining Vale premieres on STARZ on Sunday, March 6th.

“We always set out for it to be a comedy-horror. That’s what the first one-liner was about,” Horgan shared with ComicBook.com. “That’s how it stayed, but we wanted it to be a different comedy-horror. We didn’t want it … I love Scream. I’m a huge fan of those movies and so is Jeff, but we didn’t want it to be that. We wanted it to be hard laughs, but to go a bit darker and for it not to be a stand-up of horror.”

Astrof continued, “That was the entire thing. That was our very first conversation. Sharon said, ‘You think we could do a horror that’s super funny or a comedy that’s super scary and do them both together?’ And I thought I said, ‘Yeah.’ When you’re in a horror movie … I’m not like a gigantic horror guy. I’ve watched the classics, but after you scream, you laugh. And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s just a matter of surprising people.’ And that was really, really the fun of it was just finding that tone. That was the hardest thing, for sure.”

Shining Vale is a horror-comedy about a dysfunctional family that moves from the city to a small town into a house in which terrible atrocities have taken place. But no one seems to notice except for Pat, who’s convinced she’s either depressed or possessed — turns out, the symptoms are exactly the same. Patricia “Pat” Phelps (Courteney Cox) is a former “wild child” who rose to fame by writing a raunchy, drug-and-alcohol-soaked women’s empowerment novel (a.k.a. lady porn). Fast forward 17 years later, Pat is clean and sober but totally unfulfilled. She still hasn’t written her second novel, she can’t remember the last time she had sex with her husband (Greg Kinnear), and her teenage kids are at that stage where they want you dead. She was a faithful wife until her one slip-up: she had a torrid affair with the hot, young handyman who came over to fix the sink while Terry was at work. In a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, she and Terry cash in all their savings and move the family from the “crazy” of the city to a large, old house in the suburbs that has a storied past of its own. Everyone has their demons, but for Pat Phelps, they may be real.

Helping sell the tone of the series is the cast of Shining Vale, with the creators pointing out the unexpected yet serendipitous casting process.

“It’s one of those things where the people originally thought it was written for Sharon, and I was just like, ‘No, I just have Pat in mind,’” Astrof pointed out. “We just had this woman Pat in mind and you go through your motions. And then Courteney called me out of the blue after 25 years and said, ‘I read the script, it’s written for me.’ And it was like Sharon said, Scream, we wanted to stay away from just something that had been done before. And then I said, ‘Courteney, you haven’t done anything like this,’ and she said, ‘Trust me, this is like I was meant for this.’ Obviously, we were just like — our first thought was Monica [from Friends] in a haunted house. People will watch that.”

He added, “Then she just blew us away. And then, this is going way too long, but the big thing was making Pat likable and we’re like, once we have Courteney, she’s immediately likable. But then we cast Greg who is uber likable. And it’s like, ‘Oh man, we either have to make her more likable or Greg less likable,’ … And then Mira [Sorvino] initially had one line in the pilot, and then … Her character really evolved. It’s the first show I think I’ve ever done with not a weak link.”

Shining Vale premieres on STARZ on Sunday, March 6th.

Are you looking forward to the new series? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!