Ever since the glory years of HBO in the early 2000s, there always seems to have been an ass-kicking dominator in the TV streaming wars. Over the years that torch has passed, from HBO to Netflix, FX to AMC, but now I believe we’re squarely in a new phase. Apple has been, with oddly quiet consistency, hitting it out of the park one show after another, and Widow’s Bay is its latest home run.
On a weatherbeaten island off the coast of New England, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is the mayor of Widow’s Bay. A lonely voice of ambition and optimism in a town full of gloomy cynicism, Tom wants to rebrand the island as the next Martha’s Vineyard: a booming tourist destination, boosting the island’s ramshackle economy. Unfortunately, most of his fellow citizens are convinced the island is cursed — and all the evidence points to the fact that they’re right. Nonetheless, Tom is determined to execute his plan to drag the island, kicking and screaming, into the mainstream. Even as his efforts begin to succeed, however, he can’t deny that something is definitely off about the place, and that his skepticism about the curse may be wishful thinking.
Widow’s Bay aims for a unique tonal melange: quirky comedy, campy horror, and eerie surrealism, all on tap simultaneously. The wrong actor in the lead might have tilted that tone over one edge or another, but Rhys turns out to be inspired casting as Tom, with just the right mix of subtlety and broadness to cover the requisite bases. He has a perfect foil in Stephen Root as Wyck, a doomsaying fisherman; Root slickly invokes Jawsian Robert Shaw vibes as the ominous true believer to Tom’s pseudo-confident skeptic. But the cast’s key component is Kate O’Flynn as Patricia, Tom’s deeply awkward colleague, whose cringeworthy eccentricities make her a dynamic focal point for two of the season’s best episodes (“Beach Reads” and “Your Baggage”). Surrounding this core are a choice selection of supporting players like K Callan, Kevin Carroll, Dale Dickey, and Jeff Hiller, along with Kingston Rumi Southwick, whose semi-clever teenaged condescension as Tom’s son Evan deserves special mention.
While the cast is key to both the humor and the horror, the key character is the island itself. Inventively, creator Katie Dippold and the rest of the writers use it as a Hellmouth-like canvas for monster-of-the-week horror-comedies, with results that both use and subvert familiar genre tropes. If the local government shenanigans at town hall are pure Parks and Rec, the narrative approach is closer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, presenting a new, supernatural mystery every week, episodes connected by mounting lore as each crisis reveals another layer. The ambience is often unsettling, but humor punches through at frequent, unpredictable intervals, all the funnier for the contrast. In the end, Widow’s Bay may not be doing anything all that new in the medium, but it does an impressive mix of old things extremely well, combining them a decidedly new and delightful way. Here’s wishing it a long, healthy run.
