Widow’s Bay Strikes A Bonkers Balance Between Stephen King And Atlanta
Creator Katie Dippold breaks down the disparate influences in her horror mash-up.
The parallels between Widow’s Bay and the work of Stephen King are clear from the get-go, but they feel the most palpable when the mayor of the eponymous island town, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), runs into the ghost of a literal murderous clown in its second episode. It’s appropriately harrowing — Tom is confronted by the specter in the crawl space of an obviously haunted hotel — but the Apple TV series wastes no time turning that into the setup for the perfect joke. You see, Tom seems to be the only resident of Widow’s Bay who doesn’t believe in the myriad superstitions entwined in the town’s century-old lore. He’s only at said hotel to debunk the laundry list of phantoms associated with it, but the morning after his stay, the Bay’s kookiest salty dog, Wyck (Stephen Root), only has to take one look at him to say, “The clown — that’s what got you, huh?”
It’s Root’s deadpan delivery, and his dogged commitment as Wyck, that takes Widow’s Bay from horror pastiche into surprisingly smart comedy. A handful of critics have already compared the series to a darker, drier Parks and Recreation — and given that its creator, Katie Dippold, used an early version of this story to land a spot in Parks and Rec’s writers room, that comparison feels perfectly apt.
“It was a very different version,” Dippold tells Inverse. “It was really joke-heavy, so it gave a sense of my humor, but it also wasn’t a show you could really make.”
Rhys makes for a perfect straight man in the spooky-silly Widow’s Bay.
For what it’s worth, the spec that would eventually become Widow’s Bay also feels like it shouldn’t exist — in the best way possible, of course. Horror and comedy have long proven how easily the genres work together, how similar their beats can be. But the brand of horror that also finds humor in naturalism has only really just started to emerge, with films like Weapons and Barbarian (both directed by Zach Cregger) wisely honing in on the clash between the absurd and the mundane. There’s also, most notably, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, a series so impossibly funny and bizarre that nothing has ever felt quite like it. Save for Widow’s Bay — which wisely tapped Glover’s go-to director, Hiro Murai, to direct its first batch of episodes — it’s possible nothing ever will.
“I’m such a huge fan,” Dippold says of Murai. “Atlanta was a show that was a big inspiration for me.” The FX series was airing as Dippold was rewriting Widow’s Bay, and its unpredictable scope served as confirmation that what she was attempting was possible. “I was so blown away by the storytelling and the surprise moves they would make. I could never predict what an episode would be.”
That same mutability informs the semi-episodic nature of Widow’s Bay. Dippold also took lots of inspiration from King, from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and from her own memories of growing up in 1980s New Jersey, back when haunted houses were “lawless” and would go to any length to get a scare. Dippold visited a particularly scary one every summer: “I would scream, and then when someone else screamed, I would laugh... That feeling is something I’ve been chasing forever.”
Dippold took inspiration from Stephen King, Jaws, and Atlanta to craft something utterly unique.
There’s also, admittedly, a tiny bit of Parks and Rec in Tom’s quixotic quest to make Widow’s Bay the ultimate tourist destination on the East Coast. He spent his summers as a child on the island, but lived on the mainland for the rest of the year, making him a kind of inverse Leslie Knope: the outsider who neither understands nor respects the town’s ancient ways. He wants to fashion it into the next Martha’s Vineyard — heck, he’ll even settle for Bar Harbor. But with off-putting locals, legends of cannibalism and ghosts, and, oh yeah, a fog that (allegedly!) steals souls, he’s got his work cut out for him.
“Part of the fun is thinking of things in the writers room,” Dippold says. “We’d come up with different ideas for artifacts and newspaper articles and sketches or sea shanties. It’s what seems almost comedic, looking at it in the past tense. But then when you learn, Wait, these things are starting to come back.”
Widow’s Bay might walk a tonal tightrope, but that makes it all the harder to look away.
Another bit of fun is meeting the colorful characters who inhabit Widow’s Bay. Each, in their own way, is stuck in some version of the past — though on an island with no Wi-Fi, that’s to be expected. Tom is constantly on the back foot, and not only because of Wyck, who eventually becomes a kind of Mulder to his Scully. The whole town is quietly set against him, even his whip-smart secretary Patricia (Kate O’Flynn). That said, Tom still gives as good as he gets. When Patricia openly worries about becoming the target of a rumored serial murderer, Tom is quick to comfort her: “He murdered teenage girls. You’re in your 40s.”
Rhys’ performance — half-slapstick, half-genuine pathos — is a lightning rod for Widow’s Bay’s oscillating tone. His Tom is a little like Cary Grant or Frasier Crane if you dropped either of them in the Twilight Zone: one minute he’s debasing himself in front of the blue-collar locals; the next he’s showing off his dramatic chops in quiet character moments with his rebellious teenage son.
“I think that man can do anything as an actor,” Dippold says of Rhys. “Loftis’ point is like, ‘Yes, so bad things have happened here, but that doesn’t mean that it’s supernatural.’” Dippold worked hard to juggle his skepticism with the truly spooky goings-on in Widow’s Bay — as the series progresses, there’s a true push-pull between Tom and locals like Wyck. Who’s really right about what’s happening? Can they both be? Time will tell, but we can expect their journey to be filled with as many laughs as there are scares.
