Here’s the thing: if anyone is crazy enough to dream up a gagging, bent-over-and-cackling workplace series about the cringiest bunch of godforsaken, small-town despondents that is at the same time a deadpan, bone-chilling horror story, let them. Chances are, something so bonkers is a rare work of genius. This fusion of ideas might sound ludicrous, but Widow’s Bay is the said work of genius to shiver thine timbers, and it excels at every level.
Apple TV, a rare streamer unafraid to plunge headfirst into the surreal or the uncanny, gambled plenty with Widow’s Bay. A strange blend of office comedy and gothic horror, wrapped in a supernatural mystery with a thriller narrative, sounds too odd and too forceful to work. However, if you show the real human problems underneath—and throw in Matthew Rhys, TV’s most honest tortured soul—you might just get yourself a winner.
Creator Katie Dippold and director Hiro Murai did all that with aplomb, and their spectacularly fresh, superbly acted spookfest rightly became one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of recent seasons. Widow’s Bay might be the world’s most cursed place, but its bizarre charms invite repeat visits from fans of any genre affiliation. You will love these miserable folks so much that you will walk through hell with them without flinching (OK, there will likely be some flinching).
Something is rotten off the coast of New England, but Tom Loftis (the ever-flawless Rhys) be damned if he will let some (alleged) evil spirits get in the way of his ambition. The mayor of the unimpressionable, ominously named Widow’s Bay island and a pater familias of sorts to the tightly woven residents, Loftis nevertheless struggles to secure a win. A clumsy widower unable to reason with his teenage son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), Tom is also a hapless bureaucrat incapable of dealing with his offbeat colleagues and zany residents alike.
His elderly secretary, Ruth (K. Callan), prioritizes naps over office duties; his oddball assistant, Patricia (a breakout Kate O’Flynn), obsesses over him; the rest of the employees (Dale Dickey, Jeff Hiller, and Nancy Lenehan) are either brown-nosers or dissenters. Everything is in shambles on the outside as well, where the Widow’s Bay folk insist the island is afflicted by a melange of curses so diverse as to make Hitchcock blush.
For starters, the age-old superstition is that anyone born on the island will die the moment they set foot elsewhere, but at least that catastrophe can be avoided if one stays put. Unfortunately, even those who did stick within the perimeter too often met a gruesome demise—centuries of calamity ranging from cannibalistic gangs to pacts with the devil, Boogeyman serial killers, and witch hunts haunt the local folklore as well as newspaper headlines. All things considered, the PR isn’t looking good.
Then there are the most pressing concerns of today, namely that the local fisherman and token rural drunk, Wyck (a fantastic Stephen Root), believes the arrival of a thick fog signifies a horrific “waking up”, bound to claim more lives in the grisliest of ways. The resident consensus is clear: something wicked the way of Widow’s Bay comes (again).
None of this, however, can stop Tom, who, defeated in every other aspect of existence, bends over backward to turn Widow’s Bay into a tourist hotspot. Despite the odds, the New York Times publishes a favorable review of the island, announcing it as “the next Martha’s Vineyard”, no less. Eager visitors start rushing in, and Tom is on the brink of some much-needed accomplishment… except the curse(s) are real. Nobody is safe, and there is no way to predict which horror will strike next.
With this in mind, it only makes sense that Widow’s Bay was developed by Katie Dippold and directed/exec produced by Hiro Murai; the former shines with her sketch experience from Mad TV and Parks and Recreation, while the latter mixes his wildest haute-aesthetic work on Barry with the quirky pastiche of Atlanta. Merging their visions brings this rare combination of botched office dynamics and petty grievances with straight-faced horror to life effectively. Neither overshadows the other, and numerous narrative curios are developed with utmost care, allowing each constituent of the story ample room to breathe and provoke reactions.
When it comes to structure, Widow’s Bay, for the most part, reads like an anthology series, a wise narrative construction given its varied, disjointed themes and plot twists. Murai purposefully wanted to break with an “overextended movie” feel of many latter-day TV shows, so he enlisted Andrew DeYoung (The Chair Company), X trilogy creator Ti West, and Sam Donovan (Severance, Humans) as the virtuosos of the weird needed to hash out separate microcosms within the same-ish mythology.
The results make for superb television. Differing visions offer idiosyncratic takes and tweaks of varied personal narratives, and each of the leads (plus several side players) gets their storytelling due. What makes the show feel like an anthology isn’t a lack of focus on the central theme of personal anxieties and monsters superimposed onto office and community life, but precisely the opposite. Each story is conceptualized with such care that it could be its own standalone journey. Peculiar as it may sound, this unapologetic emphasis on the characters, as opposed to gimmicks, is what makes Widow’s Bay such a winner.
The variety of eerie plots and scenarios of Widow’s Bay owes plenty to its mighty forebears of different genres. Elements of or outright shoutouts to Twin Peaks, LOST, Stephen King, John Carpenter, or Parks and Recreation are all over the place, though the show never slips into a mere homage or parody. Indeed, it’s the bold merging of traditional horror and mystery-genre tropes with the subtler, more visceral horror of being stuck in a life you never wanted but cannot escape that establishes Widow’s Bay as a beast of its own. The insistence on a workplace sitcom setup for most episodes, regardless of how awry things go, just makes it that much better. Funnier, too.
Nevertheless, it’s the tenderness and earnestness with which “les cooky miserables” of Widow’s Bay are approached that shine the brightest. All too often, fictional characters are treated like ciphers, bystanders to or generic cogs in an all-too-familiar plot trying to make a point. Not here. Widow’s Bay is inhabited by the most dismayed, not to mention literally cursed folks, but each of them is fleshed out thoroughly, so much so that no horror exposition—or having one’s boss chained while he trips on shrooms — can make them feel less real. Always in the gutter, but never dispirited, and always striving to overcome the outlandish circumstances of their little lives, they emerge as an inspiration we can relate to.
Tom is clumsy and unfunny, but he’ll move heaven and Earth to be a decent mayor and a good parent to Evan. No public humiliation, of which there are many, can rattle him. His resolve is strong to the point that he even confabulates a competition between Widow’s Bay and Martha’s Vineyard in an attempt to see his town enter the tourist big leagues.
Patricia, who’s been resented since adolescence for claiming to have been targeted by the serial killer Boogeyman, might be the most socially stunted adult this side of the Atlantic, but she’ll spare no effort to endear herself to her community. The episode in which she throws a party for the locals will be remembered as one of the scariest hours of television this decade, but you will still appreciate her childlike enthusiasm.
The loving, unironic commiseration is extended to all in the mighty ensemble, including the Widow’s Bay backstory heroine Sarah Westcott (a fierce Betty Gilpin), who navigates the origins of the island’s woes in 1702. Her uproariously creepy episode, shared with the TV goth horror icon Hamish Linklater of Midnight Mass in the role of Widow’s Bay founder Richard Warren, reveals plenty about the island’s odd lore, including a possible pact with the devil.
It goes with minimal explanation that a sizeable portion of Widow’s Bay‘s success is owed to the astounding skills of its cast. Rhys, widely known as the most expressively anxious leading man on TV, shines in any role that requires emotional intensity, but his comedic chops here prove otherworldly. On par with the greatest physical comedians, he turned Tom’s stubborn perseverance imbued with ever-escalating dread into instant viral meme material. It’s likely that GIFs of Tom sliding off a boat settee, tumbling over while carrying an oversized painting, or leaping from his seat in terror helped fuel the show’s immediate popularity.
Rhys’s excellence is a household matter by now, but O’Flynn takes the cake with her insufferably eager Patricia and runs wild with the eccentric role. A true breakout role of the season, her work in balancing nearly unendurable eagerness with poignant vulnerability tugs at the heartstrings in ways that don’t feel overwrought or pathetic.
Dickey and Root also generously contribute to the eeriness and hilarity of Widow’s Bay by bringing their veteran deadpan deliveries to each increasingly bizarre conversation. An eight-minute sequence in which Rosemary sketches out a family tree flowchart for Tom, Patricia, and Wyck, peppering the exposition with slurs and suspicious speculation, is a sheer demonstration of filmmaking force.
Rain or shine (and it’s mostly rain and fog), these are characters you will want to stick with you. Moreover, the creative choice to make the disparate horror themes of Widow’s Bay anchored in the characters’ personal anxieties, all converging around the motifs of isolation, loneliness, the passage of time, and obsolescence, transforms the cinematically uncanny into something real and palpable. Ultimately, the supernatural is made human, human-born even, in ways literary masters such as Henry James intended.
All things considered, there is no greater success a TV show, let alone a new one, can achieve. Widow’s Bay is here to stay, and we’ll be following Tom’s ambition to the ninth circle of Hell. It’s all but certain we’ll have to, anyway.