Welcome to Widow's Bay. Please Leave.

We've done podcasts on The Bear, Stranger Things, and a handful of others television shows, and in a few weeks, it's possible you're going to add Widow's Bay to that mix, because both Rob and Patrick are absolutely obsessed with the stories coming out of this weird island.

Horror? Comedy? Matthew Rhys? What's not to like?

So far, the only problem is the show is weekly!

Rob: I don’t know if we’re going to do an emergency My Turn on this but Patrick I need to talk about Widow’s Bay with someone or I’m going to explode.

Ever since The Americans I’m basically committed to watching anything Matthew Rhys does. He spent that entire show as a guy living double and triple lives and letting you catch glimpses of all the layers of deception and omission that he had to pierce before he could express the smallest honest emotion. It was a tremendous performance that stretched out for years building toward a series of betrayals and revelations that had been inevitable from the pilot episode, but still managed to surprise you in how they played out in his performance. Hand to God, I think the last scene between him and Noah Emmerich is maybe the best dramatic scene from this century.

The Americans was a bleak show that occasionally cracked a wry smile at the absurdity and futility of its characters. His next project, Perry Mason, somehow made The Americans look like The Dick Van Dyke Show and his role there was to be a Job-like figure of unfair burdens, misfortune, and self-loathing. It was good but frequently wretched, like you were tuning into HBO to inject moral squalor directly into your mainline arteries.

So I remember the night Apple TV put Widow’s Bay on my home screen and I watched the trailer, I had to text you immediately to see if you knew anything about it. It looked like a New England horror show except… it also looked incredibly funny? Matthew Rhys was playing an American Basil Fawlty? Did this work? Could it work?

You told me to watch it and said it had your highest recommendation and, four episodes in, I’m completely in love. It’s perfectly calibrated to my tastes, a guy who loves Remedy’s horror pastiches and was one of the few enlightened souls who appreciated The Secret World as the coolest, most unusual MMO since we stopped getting cool experiments like Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online.

Widow’s Bay is about Rhys’ Tom Loftis as the desperate, striving mayor of an eponymous New England island town with a dark history that amounts to a litany of horror genre archetypes. Its past features witch trials, cursed fog and disappearing sailors, sea monsters, and even teen-slaughtering serial killers. Loftis wants Widow’s Bay to be a booming tourist community like Nantucket or Bar Harbor and is actually starting to succeed in his quest, despite the fact that most of the locals are ambivalent at best about his vision for the island. The problem is that even as his dreams are the closest they have ever been to coming true, weird shit starts happening around the island that Loftis desperately wants to ignore or brush past before it spooks the summer visitors.

Or, to nutshell it a bit more effectively, Widow’s Bay is Eldritch Parks and Rec. Which is not a surprise: a share of the writer’s room for that show is on this one.

It’s also extremely on-point if you have spent much time in summer tourist towns or on the New England coast. There is a politics of Widow’s Bay that is very familiar to people who know such places. The simmering resentment and contempt year-rounders have for summer residents. The obnoxious, smug pride that some locals have for being almost pathologically parochial. My barber once told me that for some residents of Gloucester, my favorite town on the Massachusetts coast, some locals brag about having never crossed the bridge separating Gloucester from the rest of the state. If they’ve left Gloucester, they did it by boat, and that’s an important distinction for the dwindling number of people who truly make their living on the water. There’s also the incredibly claustrophobic feeling of these towns: are you going to the good restaurant or the diner? Do you drink at the bar the locals hang out at, and can you endure their constant jabs? Are you at the lone hotel, or at one of the twenty bed-and-breakfasts? Want to leave? Enjoy a three-hour ferry ride, departing twice a day in the busy season and not at all in the winter.

Now add to that the fact that all the local legends are maybe coming to life, and the guy who is most aware of the danger is also the one who just wants to make sure the beds are full at the hotel and people are spending money at the restaurant, and you have pretty irresistible pitch for a comedy. 

Patrick: There’s a tension that Janet and I are talking through in our study of platformers that goes something like this: is it a platformer, or a game with platforming elements? If you go back and watch the trailers for Widow’s Bay, you can tell Apple was struggling to explain what exactly Widow’s Bay was/is.

Part of that, of course, is letting the mystery unravel. What’s real? What’s not? On the other hand, one of the great joys of Widow’s Bay is trying to unpack its own thematic tensions as it progresses on. In its earliest episodes, it’s absolutely reasonable to call Widow’s Bay a comedy with horror elements. It’s mostly funny, but to a shocking nimble degree, able to contort itself into legitimate horror when needed.

The best horror understands the audience’s desire for release—sometimes through comedy. Which makes Widow’s Bay an interesting tonal experiment, because it drives an early wedge by pitching as a comedy. “Oh, it’s just going to spook me every now and then, and then it’s back to being a worthy and biting satire of some very real places, like the ones you described. But by the end of the third episode—which I suppose requires a minor spoiler warning—the show puts its cards on the table.