“Widow’s Bay” Sets a High Bar for Horror Comedy
A decade ago, back when Twitter was still Twitter, and writerly types gathered there to amuse one another, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Katie Dippold posted one of the all-time great tweets. It was “tbt,” or throwback Thursday, a weekly excuse to post a picture from one’s past. Dippold chose an image of herself sitting with a group of friends at a Halloween party, dressed as the titular character from the horror film “The Babadook.” The costume—doofy top hat, smeared white paint—suggested full commitment to the bit. The only problem was that no one else in the photo was dressed up. Dippold captioned the post “Tbt to Halloween when I dressed as the babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown ups drinking wine vibe.” The heady mix of emotions the image stirred up—amusement, horror, secondhand humiliation—made it go hugely viral. In an interview with New York, Dippold said, “I feel like that tweet just shows my soul.”
Dippold is a prolific comedy writer, who got her start on “MADtv,” wrote for “Parks and Recreation,” and has worked on films such as “The Heat” and the “Ghostbusters” reboot. But her dream was to make a series that combined her lifelong passion for horror movies with her absurdist comedic instincts (essentially, the spirit of her “Babadook” tweet, adapted for television). She grew up in New Jersey in the eighties, and she had formative memories of visiting a haunted house on the boardwalk: “It was so scary,” she has said. “And I was also laughing so much, and I felt giddy, and that’s a kind of feeling I’ve been chasing my whole life.” She first tried to capture this feeling back in 2009, in a spec script she wrote to land a job on “Parks and Recreation,” which asked: What if the residents of a small town like Pawnee had to face nightmares beyond administrative red tape?
That episode was never made, but after what Dippold described as “years and years of trial and error,” she recently realized her vision in the form of “Widow’s Bay,” a new comedic horror series that just concluded its first season on Apple TV. There have been many scary television shows that are also funny (“Dexter,” “Santa Clarita Diet,” even “Hannibal”) and many television comedies that traffic in horror tropes (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Los Espookys,” “Search Party”), but few, if any, provide a seamless blend of humor and frights. The comedies often fail to elicit real goosebumps, and the thrillers often deploy comedy so erratically that they veer into camp. “Widow’s Bay,” excelling in both modes, has the rare distinction of striking a tone that feels genuinely new. It is easily one of the best shows of the year.
The setting is a tiny, fictional island three hours off the coast of New England, reachable only by ferry. The time is the present day, though, perhaps owing to its isolation from the mainland, the island seems to have stalled permanently in the nineteen-eighties. Cell service is spotty, so inhabitants often communicate using landlines and walkie-talkies. Many islanders look as if they’ve been pulled off the set of “Jaws” (salty beards, chum-stained dungarees) or “Sleepaway Camp” (colorful bike shorts, knee-high moccasins). They decorate their homes in the dated style of those who have access to new furniture only via barge: chintz and wicker abound. And the anachronism is only one of the island’s unique properties. Widow’s Bay, alas, is saddled with an ancient curse, or so many of its denizens believe, and it may or may not be trying to kill its inhabitants as a result. A foundational part of the island’s dark mythology is a belief that anyone born there cannot safely leave it; awful fates befall any natives who dare to venture out. It’s a great setup for a thriller. It also happens to be a great setup for a comedy about quirky local bureaucrats whose jobs are literally hellish.
Their leader is Tom Loftis, the island’s ambitious mayor, played by the great Welsh actor Matthew Rhys. He has a job that nobody wants (he ran for office uncontested), but he takes it extremely seriously. Tom was born off the island, so he is naturally skeptical of the local lore, but deep down he has suspicions about the place. His wife, we learn, was a native who tried to leave the island while pregnant, then suffered a massive stroke during childbirth, supposedly leading to her untimely death. The tragedy left Tom as a single father, and he fears that his teen-age son, Evan, who was born in Widow’s Bay, is among those who can never leave. Still, as the town representative, Tom must swat such rumors away to keep up citizen morale, and also because he dreams that under his tenure the run-down Widow’s Bay will become a bustling tourist destination.
