We laughed! We screamed! Or that’s the hope, anyway, when one watches the strangely chimeric genre that is comedy-horror.
Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, winner of a mostly deserved 14 Emmys earlier this month, is the rare example of the form that actually pulls off each half of the trick. Viewers will surely have seen both funnier and scarier productions, but I can’t recall any that balanced those two elements with greater style.
The show is headlined by Matthew Rhys, the suddenly-everywhere Welshman most famous for his work on FX’s Cold War drama The Americans (2013-18). In the last two years alone, the 51-year-old has played a police inspector in an Agatha Christie adaptation (Towards Zero), Thomas Paine in a Ken Burns documentary (The American Revolution), and a sociopathic real-estate developer (The Beast in Me), among numerous other roles. Here, as a small-town mayor battling what may well be satanic forces, the actor takes his droll likability to new heights. If I ever meet a “sea hag” on a poor man’s Nantucket, I want Rhys with me.
His primary costar, for all intents and purposes, is the title hamlet itself, an island community 42 miles off the New England coast. Insular, hardscrabble, and contentedly weird, Widow’s Bay is the kind of place that produces not only local myths but the curious outlooks that sometimes accompany them.
“Great source of pride,” a municipal worker says of the town’s long-ago witch trials. “We caught ’em. We burned ’em.” That the recipient of that history is a cosmopolitan travel writer from the New York Times makes the gag all the more delicious.
Rhys’s character, Mayor Tom Loftis, spends much of the early going in a state of understandable dismay. On the one hand, Widow’s Bay could be “the next Martha’s Vineyard,” if groomed and advertised correctly. On the other hand, the residents are certain that the town is occupied by ghouls. Take, for instance, lifelong islander Wyck Crawford (Office Space’s Stephen Root), a crusty specimen given to extravagant displays. When, against all odds, the town’s cursed inn finally books up for a night, Wyck responds by nailing a two-by-four across its entry door.
If Widow’s Bay were not actually haunted, the show might work as an exploration of the paranoia to which isolated communities are inclined. Because it is, the joke is on Tom’s increasingly indefensible refusal to believe, even after a series premiere that sees him attacked by a demon-possessed man. It is not until the appearance of the aforementioned sea hag, in fact, that Tom comes to terms with reality, represented here by a dripping-wet supernatural crone. By the time of that encounter in the third episode, our hero has already been scratched, choked, chased, and jump-scared by fiends. (With another, he has played an old-fashioned board game.) Far be it from me to criticize another man’s principles, but Rhys’s character takes self-applauding Epicurean materialism to new depths of futility.
The show’s universe, by contrast, is one in which the spiritual world is aggressively alive. At times, the production’s “beings” are a semi-comic mashup from Hollywood history, with Friday the 13th (1980), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and The Ring (2002) all present and accounted for. Even Scary Movie (2000) is referenced. Yet a flashback episode set in 1702 is so straight-faced and austere that it may as well have been adapted from a sermon in colonial America. In that particular installment, the show’s sixth of 10, mainlander Sarah Westcott (Betty Gilpin) arrives in Widow’s Bay to seal an arranged marriage with its founder. What she discovers is a devil’s bargain whose repercussions will echo through the centuries.
The season’s narrative arc chiefly concerns the reversal of that 300-year-old error. Along the way, two stand-alone episodes vie for a place among the best TV hours of the year. The first, just mentioned, sees Gilpin (Nurse Jackie, GLOW) deliver a tour de force turn as a woman forced by circumstances to summon a desperate courage. The second, a showcase for actress Kate O’Flynn (My Lady Jane) as frumpy town hall assistant Patricia, is a darkly hilarious look at the consequences of social ostracism.
So representative is the latter episode, “Beach Reads,” of the series’s wicked charms that it deserves to be considered at length. A recluse unloved by the local wine moms, Patricia discovers, in a discard bin, a book-length guide to throwing the perfect party. What follows is a startling turnabout, as our heroine’s moment of triumph is revealed to be little less than an inadvertent witches’ sabbath. The episode works so well not only because O’Flynn is a revelation in her role but because series creator Hiro Murai takes the hour seriously as both comedy and horror, not to mention psychodrama, thriller, and revenge fantasy. To put it another way, Widow’s Bay is at its best when it is least classifiable. Why be fish or fowl when you can be a morbidly fascinating combination of both and more?
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There is a case to be made, of course, that Widow’s Bay was overdecorated at this year’s Emmys, despite its inarguable quality. Yes, all four of the performers named in this review deserved (and won) the relevant “comedy” acting award, but aren’t the drama categories considerably more competitive? For that matter, wouldn’t Widow’s Bay have fared worse if made to compete with Pluribus, Slow Horses, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and other “dramas” with a reasonable share of laughs?
Fair points, but ultimately irrelevant. Don’t watch Widow’s Bay because voters loaded it down with trophies. Watch it because it’s one of the best and weirdest new shows on TV.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic at the Washington Examiner magazine.