Mid-life crisis. Stalled-out career. Parenting teenagers.
Oh, and the new house is probably haunted.
Courteney Cox’s Pat Phelps really has her work cut out for her in this new STARZ series, Shining Veil.
But the twist here? Pat’s haunting may just save her career. Shining Veil is taking the idea of ghostwriting literally.
The horror-comedy comes from co-creators Jeff Astroff (Trial & Error, Ground Floor) and Sharon Horgan (Divorce, Catastrophe). In addition to Cox, the series stars Greg Kinnear, Mira Sorvino, Gus Birney, Merrin Dungey, and Dylan Gage. It also features appearances by and features Judith Light and Sherilyn Fenn.
Here’s the official synopsis of the series from STARZ:
Pat and Terry Phelps (Cox and Kinnear) cash in their life savings and move from a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, to an old Victorian mansion in Shining Vale, Connecticut as a last-ditch effort to save their marriage after Pat’s torrid affair with Frank, their young hot handyman who came over to fix the sink while Terry was at work. To make matters worse for Terry, Frank never fixed the sink, yet still charged him for it!
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), Pat is now clean and sober 17 years later but totally unfulfilled. She still hasn’t written her second novel, she can’t remember the last time she had sex with her husband, while her teenage daughter, Gaynor (Gus Birney) wants Pat dead and Jake (Dylan Gage), their adolescent son, is so addicted to screens he’s completely checked out.
Buying a 200-year-old house that was on the market for almost three years and sold for more than $250K below asking seemed like a good idea on paper, but Pat senses that the Phelps are not alone; especially when an old-fashioned-looking woman appears hovering outside their family room window.
The Phelps quickly learn why the agents were so motivated to sell the house for a fraction of the asking price. Seems a few details were glossed over, including a triple murder-suicide and a host of other atrocities they neglected to mention. But neither Terry nor the kids seem to notice that something is horribly wrong with their new home; only Pat can see things move and hear the bumps in the night. She’s also the only one who sees the spirit of the person who used to live there, Rosemary (Sorvino), a Fifties housewife who may or may not be trying to take over Pat’s body. Is Pat depressed, or possessed? Turns out the symptoms are exactly the same.
Everyone has their demons, but for Pat Phelps, they may be real.
Shining Veil will premiere on STARZ Sunday, March 6. If you have the STARZ app or plan to stream the series on-demand, you’ll even be able to catch the episode sooner. It releases on streaming at 12AM March 6. For linear TV viewers, you can catch Shining Veil at 10:20pm on the STARZ channel.
