Ten minutes into watching Widow’s Bay, Apple TV’s buzzy new horror-comedy, a feeling began to come over both me and my partner, quite like the ominous fog over the titular fictional island town: had we finally found a show we could both enjoy together, in earnest?
The rapid enshittification of media and entertainment, coinciding with being working toddler parents and thus having a perennial shortage of fuck-you time, has meant that our TV watching in recent times has mostly been a distracted, dissociative exercise over dinner—him with whatever zestless, too darkly lit drama he can tolerate. And me recycling Tina Fey’s oeuvre and burrowing through a catalogue of gruesome true crime to feel something. But Widow’s Bay made it past our bored stupor.
The thing is, it’s hella cosy. Widow’s Bay, an off-the-grid New England town with a chequered past, is being rushed through a tourism-friendly rebrand as “the next Martha’s vineyard”, led by its ineffectual mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys in chef’s-kiss casting). Tom is ignoring warnings that the place is due its next round of supernatural horrors any minute due to a centuries-old curse.
Creator and showrunner Kate Dippold dreamed up this world 20 years ago as a jokey spec script when she was a writer on that other memorable series about small government in a nowhere town, Parks and Recreation. “But I don’t know that I would have watched that show, because I think it could have felt more like a spoof, and as a horror fan, I just wanna be immersed into the island,” she told Deadline.
Looks like she be’ed the change she wanted to see in the world. Because over the 10-episode season, you get all the best horror tropes—forbidding landscapes, small-town secrets and superstitious locals, foolish idealists and leathery monsters—knit together with humour that feels inbuilt rather than slapped on.
Rhys is undeniable as Mayor Loftis, perfectly embodying the new class of leading heartthrob: the handsome beta male sharing power with others instead of wielding it all and only a little resentful about it. He’s partnered by an equally delightful supporting cast, the absolute star of which is Kate O’Flynn in a career-making turn as the mayor’s woke-weirdo secretary Patricia, who’s battling her own demons (no, literally). And special mention for character-acting heavyweight Dale Dickie as Rosemary, the office crone with the delicious smoker’s cough who serves as the comic foil to some of the show’s most tense moments.
They’re captained deftly by director and executive producer Hiro Murai (he’s got Barry, Atlanta, and The Bear on his CV), who knows how to root the fantastical in real emotion and wind up the tension amidst the slapstick. You’re wheezing one minute, you’re watching through your fingers the next, and you’re genuinely rooting for all of the characters to not die horribly. Soon I wasn’t even reaching for the second screen in my hand, and when does that happen anymore?
And so, we willingly wrecked our sleep hygiene for three nights in a row, smashing that ‘Next Episode’ button before either of us had a chance to see reason. We found ourselves looking forward to dinnertime together instead of speed-eating by turns to make the baby’s bedtime as we usually do. The setup—low lighting, advance-ordered dessert, me hissing “pause it!” whenever I went to get seconds—resembled date nights of yore.
Was the secret sauce here that each of our preferred genres crossed over neatly into the other’s territory? Not really. My partner enjoys a good comic caper, and I’ll watch a good excavation of the human condition where there’s no jokes as far as the eye can see. I think our actual preferred genre is good.
And what makes something genuinely good? There’s a clue in what Apple TV chief Eddy Cue told The Wrap at this year’s Cannes Lions festival, where he was named Entertainment Person of the Year for the platform’s growing reputation as the new home of prestige TV. He said, “We’re not after genres. We’re not trying to make shows that are for females between the ages of 25 and 34. We’re making shows for everyone… We’ve always said, ‘We don’t want to be the most. We want to be the best’…and we’re going to create a place where the best storytellers in the world are going to want to tell their stories there.”
Their strategy seems to be paying off. Widow’s Bay feels fresh and authentically fun precisely because it’s not encumbered by the kind of create-by-numbers quality that so much of TV suffers from today. There is no thinly veiled commentary on a hot social issue, or belaboured exposition because they don’t want to lose us to the Reels.
Apple TV’s decision to prize quality over quantity, to treat audiences with a little more respect than just as numbers on a dashboard, and to throw resources at great talent and let them cook, is why they’ve racked up a steady run-rate of sleeper megahits—Severance, The Studio, Shrinking, Pluribus, Slow Horses—that have wound their way to the top almost exclusively on word of mouth. And now they have another on their hands.
