“I SEE DEAD PEOPLE"
COURTENEY COX PLAYS A MENOPAUSAL WOMAN HAUNTED BY HER PAST SINS IN SHINING VALE
FOR THE LAST THREE decades, writer Jeff Astrof has built a career writing realistic stories for strong women. From Friends to The New Adventures Of Old Christine and Angie Tribeca, he’s aged up with his leading women, sharing their authentic experiences navigating the world. Now, as a writer of a certain age, it was perfect timing when he was introduced to Catastrophe creator Sharon Horgan to help develop her series idea of doing “The Shining as a comedy.”
Reflecting on reading her spec script for Shining Vale, Astrof tells Red Alert that he especially remembers the very last page’s striking quote. “It said women are more than twice as likely as men to be depressed, and more than twice as likely as men to be possessed. And the symptoms are the same. I looked it up and it’s really, really fascinating,” he enthuses. “This was something I’d never seen before.”
Despite having never dabbled in horror before, Astrof says he had a strong affinity for Horgan’s idea about exploring the midlife crisis of author Patricia “Pat” Phelps (Courteney Cox), which plays out within the dusty rafters of an old house that once witnessed some terrible atrocities, as Pat uses the attic as a writing annex. “In our first conversation, Sharon asked me, ‘Do you think that horror and comedy can exist in large measure?’ And I said, ‘Yes, because when you watch a horror movie, after you scream, you laugh.’ It’s the same continuum. We just write a comedy, but we shoot it like a horror movie.”
THE DESCENT
Astrof was hired to executive produce/ showrun the series, and used his own family’s history with mental illness, as well as his professional angst, to flesh out Pat. Crafting the pilot with Horgan, they hired only female directors for the series, and two female staff writers to chart Pat’s complicated descent into acerbic darkness. That’s ignited by a collision of events, including the onset of menopause, an acute case of writer’s block and an impulsive affair which almost ruins her long-time marriage to husband Terry (Greg Kinnear).
In crafting the series’ tone, Astrof says there was a steep learning curve when it came to stitching the comedy and horror. “I had to wrestle the two forms together, which was the challenge, but also the fun part. It was just exciting to come to work and say, ‘How am I gonna scare people?’ Also, I love the psychological point of view because I’m also of a certain age, so I made Pat a writer, because I’m a writer. And I know what it’s like to fear
Women are more than twice as likely as men to be depressed, and more than twice as likely as men to be possessed
not being able to write. And [then you discover] there are rules to horror. There’s rules to mental illness. There’s rules for demons,” he chuckles.
In the wake of their marital problems, Pat and Terry try for a fresh start and move the family to a creepy fixer-upper that only adds to her overall sense of disquiet. Then when the “ghost” of ’50s housewife Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), who is tied to the house, reveals herself to Pat, the blurring of everything gets more intense.
“This story was conceived in the beginning so that Pat is never sure, and we as an audience are never sure, whether or not Rosemary is real, or if it’s mental illness,” Astrof teases.
As Rosemary becomes a bigger presence in Pat’s life, the two women from disparate eras provoke one another to look at their histories with fresh eyes. For Pat, that means confronting her most recent sins, her complicated mother (Judith Light) and her angry teenage daughter Gaynor (Gus Birney). “I was really interested in Gaynor’s story, so we link that to Pat’s mom,” Astrof says. “Pat is afraid of becoming her mom. And then we find out that Gaynor is afraid of becoming Pat.”
At the centre of it all is Cox, who Astrof says threw herself into the role with abandon. “She was just all-in 100%,” he enthuses. “She came in and hired two different acting coaches. She told me that she had a list of 20 things that she still wanted to do over the course of her career, and we did them all in the first season. So she’s doing the work of her career.”
Excited about how audiences will receive the show, Astrof says he thinks the series gets “better and better and scarier and scarier” as the season progresses. “This is [a fight] for a woman’s soul.” And if Pat’s story clicks with viewers, he says there’s plenty of story to come.
“I knew basically how the season was gonna end, and I know how season two is gonna end also. I’m not sure about season three, but it’s
already in my mind.”
Shining Vale premieres on Starzplay on 6 March.