666 Park Avenue Series Premiere Review

Christopher John Falcioni ’16 & Kristina Carroll ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Staff

With Once Upon A Time and Revenge creating a solid line up for Sunday night, it would seem like a giant gamble to have a new show following the two, creating what would be a three hour power block of fantasy, drama, and suspense. But ABC’s executives have not fallen into the trap that many of the Drake Hotel’s residents have as their gamble with the new series 666 Park Avenue has paid off.
Our story begins with Gavin Doran, the apartment owner with a bit of a dark side to him (he is Terry O’Quinn, Lost’s John Locke, after all). We quickly see in the great history of “Deals with the Devil”, he is not what he claims to be along with his wife, Olivia, who does not exactly have a heart of gold either.
After a violinist breaks his deal with the Doran’s, Gavin announces that the musician’s time is up and the musician’s hand begins to bleed profusely. The scene then quickly cuts to the beautiful Drake hotel, on 666 (999 in daylight) Park Ave where our violinist friend gets sucked up into a square in the front door.
We are then introduced to the newest occupants of the hotel: Henry Martin (Dave Annable) and Jane Van Veen (Rachael Taylor), a couple who are quickly employed as co-managers of the building. Gavin seems all too eager work with Jane to restore the hotel back to its original creepy glory, and the plot thickens when the basement floor has a tile design of a dragon etched into it, which later comes up in Jane’s dreams along with zombies and suicide. Considering “Drake” means “Dragon”, there’s definitely a “motif” going on here, as Jane points out.
Enter the artsy couple Brian and Louise Leonard, played by Robert Buckley and Mercedes Masohn. Brian’s nerdiness mixed with his sweet personality definitely make him one of the most beloved characters in the show. Unfortunately, Brian’s relationship with Louise is clearly going down the tubes, despite efforts on both parts to hold it together. So when he sees a beautiful blonde woman undressing through his window, he can’t help but stare at her…on multiple occasions. If that was not weird enough for you, things get even more awkward when Brian comes home to find the same naked blonde woman in his living room, except this time she was thankfully wearing clothes. We later come to find out that Louise hired her as her new photography assistant. However, what happens next is no big coincidence as lets just say that Louise suffers from a traumatizing “accident” with an elevator door, in which her body was crushed several times.
On top of this already action packed season premiere, there is also a sealed room in the basement that’s inevitably filled with bad news in the form of a woman named Nona that’s pickpocketing random small items, and a man who breaks his promise of murdering somebody to keep his wife alive. Not to mention there is an abundance of glamour, sex, and red dresses. And did we mention zombie-ghosts? From a flickering light in the basement to an eerie stairwell, no place in the hotel is safe from the evil grasps of hell.
So did we enjoy it? In a word: Yes. We were frightened by the ghosts and intrigued by the mysteries. While Once Upon A Time and Revenge have us hooked, 666 Park Avenue will definitely keep us “checked in” to ABC for one more hour every Sunday night.