'Widow's Bay'

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At the end of a very strange dinner punctuated by flickering lights and ominous warnings, a travel writer (Bashir Salahuddin) scouting an island village diagnoses what he sees as the problem with its marketing pitch. “I see what’s going on here. You don’t want to be Nantucket. You want to be Salem,” he says. Leaning in, he adds, “It’s a nice town. You don’t need the gimmick.”

It’s a well-intentioned bit of advice, and exactly the compliment mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), the man who’s been desperately trying to show him a good time, has been hoping to hear. By that point, however, Tom, and we, understand that he is dead wrong. This is a nice town. But its spookiness is no gimmick. It’s the real deal. And in a TV landscape dotted with quirky little hamlets, it’s the best reason to drop in on Widow’s Bay, Apple’s uneven but intriguing mashup of Pawnee-style coziness and Derry-esque chills.

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Widow's Bay

The Bottom Line

Worth a visit.

Airdate: Wednesday, April 29 (Apple)

Cast: Matthew Rhys, Kate O'Flynn, Stephen Root, Kevin Carroll, Dale Dickey, Kingston Rumi Southwick, Jeff Hiller, K Callan

Creator: Katie Dippold

Even before the island reveals its supernatural hand, it exerts a strong pull. With sweet shingled buildings, a briny breeze you can practically taste thanks to Christian Sprenger’s crisp photography, and an appealingly old-fashioned lack of Wi-Fi, Widow’s Bay, located 40 miles off the New England coast, feels like a refreshing antidote to disconnected modernity.

If its denizens seem a bit offbeat, that’s part of the charm — this is the sort of insular enclave where a chain-smoking gossip (Dale Dickey’s Rosemary) will tell you exactly which of her neighbors is suffering from syphilis or crushing debt, and a salty fisherman (Stephen Root’s Wyck) can trace his lineage on this rock back for centuries. And while Tom might be desperate to downplay the town’s surprisingly bleak history (the people did not immediately turn to cannibalism during the deadly storm of 1786, he insists to a visitor: “That took four days!”), even that just adds to its sense of character. It’s no wonder he imagines this place becoming the next Martha’s Vineyard.

But Widow’s Bay, it soon becomes apparent, is more than just strange. Among locals, it’s established fact that the whole place is damned: Monsters roam its woods and mysterious storms rock its coastlines, and legend has it anyone born here can never leave. Mainlanders like Tom might be more skeptical of those claims (and to be fair, he’s not wrong to point out that “the fog took him” is hardly the only logical explanation for the disappearance of a sailor with a drinking problem), but the evidence speaks for itself. By the end of the first episode, it’s clear something unequivocally supernatural is happening here. By the midpoint of its ten-part season, it’s obvious Tom must do something to counteract the curse, lest it destroy not only his citizens but all the tourists he’s insisted on luring here, in a “mayor from Jaws“-level fit of denial.

At its best, Widow’s Bay highlights the blurry line between comedy and horror. The premiere, directed by Hiro Murai (Atlanta), bleeds from the former to the latter as Tom tries at first to brush off the island’s ugly history (“But he murdered teenage girls. You’re in your 40s,” he reasons with an assistant, Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia, still haunted by her youthful brush with a serial killer) and then is confronted by the sheer, undeniable truth of it. That it’s not always easy to decide what’s odd in a scary way and what’s odd in a funny way is part of the fun.

Another favorite of mine was the Patricia-centric, Sam Donovan-helmed fourth episode, which cuts a jagged line between the pathos of her loneliness, the cringe comedy of her efforts to fix it, and true horror as we realize what she’s been driven to do. It’s also one of the few installments not centered around Tom, and speaks to the potential for any future seasons to continue fleshing out the rest of the ensemble.

But if Widow’s Bay excels at setting a tone of pervasive oddness, with the help of directors like Ti West and Andrew Young, it’s less reliable

'Widow's Bay' Review: Matthew Rhys in Fun but Uneven Apple Horror-Com