‘666 Park Avenue’ premiere review: It’s ‘American Horror Story’ lite!
Sometimes, a show can be flawed and still be entertaining, and that is precisely what we feel about “666 Park Avenue” upon watching it for the first time. It was nice to see Terry O’Quinn land a series regular role for the first time since his days on “Lost,” just like it was nice to see Vanessa Williams on the air again following the end of “Desperate Housewives.” The show had the sort of creepy house vibe as the first season of “American Horror Story,” but the real difference here was that this this show was about an entire building of residences rather than juts an individual one.
Really, there are so many moving pieces here that it is rather hard to sum up, but what we can say about the show thus far is this: it revolves around a couple named Henry (Dave Annable) and Jane (Rachael Taylor, hoping to recover from “Charlie’s Angels”) who took on the roles of managers of this new building, but in the process they slowly started to learn that there were all sorts of strange things that were unfolding here. People were dying, there were creepy neighbors (including a geeky peeping Tom who learned that the target of his viewing was actually a bit of exhibitionist), and there were even some warnings surrounding the owners (O’Quinn and Williams) based on some of the comments coming in from elsewhere. Were there some scares sure, as a scene involving in an elevator in particular is going to make us nervous to ever be on an elevator again.
While there were all sorts of unrealistic moments in the premiere (yes, it is a horror show), we were mostly about to overlook this thanks to most of the scares being a little bit surprising. Outside of the very beginning there was nothing particularly supernatural, and most of the terrors either happened via dream sequences are “accidents” that could actually happen in real life. There is some genuine potential here, and that alone will keep us watching. With that being said, though, we’d like a little bit more cohesion from episode 2 rather than a bunch of scary moments that don’t fit together completely.
What did you think about this premiere?