When Twin Peaks aired in 1990, its first season was critically acclaimed. Once the mystery was solved in the middle of the second season, the show ground to a dull halt, its ratings falling, and the show would subsequently be canceled (only to be revived in 2017 among the trend of reboots and revivals on television). Twin Peaks does find its way into Shining Vale (including cheeky appearances by Twin Peaks alumna Sherilyn Fenn), but the first season does owe most of its storylines to the Kubrick horror classic, The Shining. In the second series, the show returns and replaces its base with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Unfortunately, as great and exciting as the first series is, the second season is a mess.
The second combines comedy, horror, and parody, like the first series. However, the parody in the second series feels derivative instead of clever. The joke feels ham-fisted and tired as obvious allusions are made to Rosemary’s Baby – visual cues so apparent that it starts to feel like sketch comedy.
***Spoiler Alerts***
The first series ended with disturbed Pat Phelps (Courteney Cox) committed to a mental institution, just like her mother Joan (Judith Light) had been. The finale of the first series saw Pat violently threatening her family, including trying to kill husband Terry (Greg Kinnear), knocking him cold with a savage hit on the head with the blunt end of an axe.
The second series picks up four months after the end of the first series, and daughter Gaynor (Gus Birney) has assumed the position of matriarch of the family. After months of grueling physical and mental therapy, an amnesiac Terry returns home using a Zimmer frame. Misfit son Jake (Dylan Gage) has found popularity in high school as the team mascot. Gaynor is barely keeping things together, the house descending into squalid chaos, as she struggles to nurse her father and raise her brother.
Pat comes home amidst this chaos after being released from the institution. It’s important to note that her release wasn’t due to any breakthrough she made through therapy but because her health insurance ran out. So, despite several rounds of electroshock therapy, it’s clear that Pat is not all right. Though she tries to reinsert herself as the head of the household again, Pat fails to convince her family that she’s good. Things turn even more macabre when her ghostly nemesis, Rosemary, returns corporeal as the gregarious earth mother yenta from next door, Ruth Levin (Mira Sorvino).
With her mental health more fragile than ever, Pat is experiencing a career resurgence as her book (ghostwritten by Rosemary) slowly becomes a bestseller as she grows into a folk heroine of wronged women everywhere. The media hype around the book prompts a rash of women hacking their men to death, much to Pat’s dismay.
As the episodes progress to the predictable ending, it feels like the writers throw everything in, seeing what works and what doesn’t – and most doesn’t work. Throwing Pat into heightened situations that get more extreme and elaborate paradoxically dulls the effect. What works so well for the first season is the subtlety of the supernatural horror elements. There is no restraint in the second season; instead, it feels like we’re watching an overly indulgent game.
It doesn’t mean that the second season is a whole loss. Throughout every episode, the one-liners are fantastic. Despite it being a bad season, it’s still very funny. Cox is just as committed and hilarious as in the first season – the splotchy writing doesn’t hamper her comic prowess. She’s supported by a great cast, with Light and Birney as particular standouts (as is an especially peppery Harriet Sansom Harris). And Sorvino gets a lot more to do in this season, playing several characters (with several broad accents) and is a campy scene stealer. But the outstanding work of the cast cannot distract us from just how rough the writing and storytelling are; it’s clear that Shining Vale is a one-season wonder. If there is a third season (creator Jeff Astrof had started working on a third series when the show was axed and hopes that the show could be saved), the show needs to go back to the first season, where it was more about Pat’s increasingly slippery grasp on reality. The second series ends on a cliffhanger, which sets the stage for a much larger, messier season so that the cancellation may have been a kind mercy.
A Seat in the Aisle 
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