Wicked good

Apple TV series Widow’s Bay is an addictive horror comedy

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Both big- and small-screen productions have become so formulaic and derivative that pointing out that fact is, itself, formulaic and derivative. Regardless, there are deviations from the norm, and the new Apple TV series Widow’s Bay is a prime example. 

Premiered on April 29, the 10-episode season just aired its sixth and seven installments on May 27, with further entries scheduled for Wednesdays through June 17. Each week it gets better and better.

Starring Matthew Rhys, with critical support from Kate O’Flynn and Stephen Root, Widow’s Bay is a witch’s brew of horror and comedy focused on a fictional New England town of the same name that has a troubled past, to put it lightly. Situated on a weather-whipped island lacking almost every modern convenience — from Wi-Fi to cell service — the few thousand inhabitants know everything about their neighbors, secrets and all, and life revolves around a handful of bars and cafes, the local church and City Hall.

The latter is where Tom Loftis (Rhys) serves as the beleaguered, endlessly exasperated mayor of a community that barely tolerates him, and his only allies are the collection of oddballs who make up the municipal staff. That includes his assistant Patricia (O’Flynn), a socially maladjusted, embittered but earnest lifelong local; Rosemary (Dale Dickey), a chain-smoking, hard-bitten city employee whose exact position remains amorphous; Ruth (Katherine Callen), his batty, ancient secretary; and Dale (Jeff Hiller), a persnickety dweeb whose official job is also unclear.

Loftis’ working life is the first example of how Widow’s Bay breaks from formula. The show was created by Parks and Recreation screenwriter Katie Dippold, and she brings to bear her genius for creating workplace ensembles that are addictive to watch. Right off the bat, the audience is introduced to a dysfunctional city government full of eccentrics who ostensibly manage a community that’s even more off-kilter than they are (call it Pawnee-meets-Twin Peaks-meets Amity Island). 

Then there are the townsfolk, unofficially led by salty seadog Wyck (Root). Wyck literally knows where all the bodies are buried and thinks Loftis — who despite a lifelong relationship with the island wasn’t born there — is a pathetic milquetoast and beneath contempt.

Through Wyck (who brings to mind Captain Quint, from Jaws), we learn that the island is unironically cursed: rife with killer fogs and storms, sinister entities and serial murderers, plagues, and demon-haunted forests and shores. The supernatural terrors ramp up cyclically into a crescendo of periodic bursts of chaotic evil that the residents are doomed to endure since (for some reason?) no one born on the island ever leaves it. 

When we come to Widow’s Bay in the first episode, it’s on the cusp of one such cycle and Loftis doesn’t believe a word of it. Rather, he’s frantically trying to drag the town out of its atavistic, gloom-struck funk and turn it into a touristy Martha’s Vineyard (more shades of Amity Island, from Jaws). If not for the community itself, Loftis’ quest for progress is for his son, whom he’s raising as a single father after the mysterious death of his island-born mother when the boy was an infant. 

Now a teenager, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) is also a born islander and has therefore never been to the mainland. Deadly bored, he’s a pot-smoking, trouble-making slacker whose rebelliousness underscores Loftis’ inability to control anything — even under his own roof.

There we have a family-grief drama folded into a workplace comedy operating against a Stephen King-inspired backdrop of honest-to-goodness horror with more than a few H.P. Lovecraft beats.

As the inner social tensions in Widow’s Bay grow more fraught and the instances of inexplicable disaster and mayhem pile up, Loftis comes to admit that something’s not right about his town and has to join forces with Wyck and Patricia to save a population that would just as soon vote him off the island.

Not a single performance is wasted, and the stellar scene-setting, score and production value provide a rock-solid foundation for a story that operates both episodically (almost like a monster-of-the-week format, à la X-Files) and as a cohesive overall narrative. No mean feat in a formulaic era when series are too often presented as super-long movies bloated with filler installments and exposition dumps. Widow’s Bay is as wicked sharp as it is wicked good.