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Almost two weeks ago I wrote about the horror/comedy series Widow’s Bay produced by and streaming on AppleTV, at that time I had just about caught up with the episodes in their weekly release schedule. Now the entire season has been released, and I can look upon the whole of its introduction and resolution.
Widow’s Bay has been described as what if the mayor of Amity in Jaws was our principal character and that is a fair point of comparison. Both deal with fictional New England seaside towns, one already a tourist destination but finding its summer bonanza threatened by a Great White shark that just won’t stop eating the swimmers, fishermen, and boaters, the other an isolated economically depressed community seeking to bring in those tourist dollars despite the supernatural curse laid upon the island hundreds of years prior.
Mixing comedy with horror is a tricky business, both styles depend upon the unexpected, the sudden reversal of an expected outcome, making them close siblings but when combined usually one flavor dominates over the other. Disgraced television and film creator Joss Whedon side stepped this trouble by frontloading the comedy in his pieces and draining it away almost entirely in the back half leaving horror to dominate the final acts of his works. This technique would not work for Widow’s Bayand would instead have come off like a switcheroo on the audience if the front half of episode had been mostly or entirely comedic and the back half horrific, Katie Dippold needed to find the balance in each of the 10 episodes. I think, for the most part, she did. While I found the final resolution to the season just a touch unsatisfying it was not so much of a stumble that I did not enjoy the entirety of the season and look forward to the next already ordered season.
Without a doubt my favorite character in the show is the long suffering, socially awkward, and nearly communally invisible aide to the mayor, Patricia, played to perfection by imported performer Kate O’Flynn. Perhaps I, also socially awkward, identify too closely with Patricia but I also think that the writers, who may also be socially awkward it is professional hazard, have a soft spot for her. The pair of episodes that center on her, 4 Beach Reads & 8 Your Baggage, are clearly my favorite. Beach Reads plays along the lines of one of my favorite sub-genres, Folk Horror, and Your Baggage makes my least loved subgenre, the Slasher, into something I actually enjoyed.
Episode 9, Emergency Shelter, in a crafty bit of writing, production design, and acting pulls off one of the most entertaining bits of pure exposition that I have ever witnessed on the screen. In The Terminator James Cameron buried exposition with action, having Reese explain the plot to Sarah Conner and the audience during a heart-pounding car chase, truly hiding your vegetables in your dessert, but Emergency Shelter stops the plot cold, laying on the brakes heavily and yet remains thoroughly fun and funny while it feeds you literally generations of genealogy and history, made possible by the acting talents of Dale Dickey as the town clerk.
The show’s central protagonist, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) has the thankless position of straight man in the comedic sequences and terrified normie in the horrific ones, I still found his character a bit too bland to fully and emotionally engage with. His relationship with his moody and disobedient teenage son failed to plow new ground and his central goal, bringing tourism and money to the island, with the side effect of hopefully freeing his son from the island’s curse, while understandable never felt more than a rote character motivation. For too much of the season I think we were not fully privy to motivations and that kept the character at a distance, leaving him feeling more perfunctory than realized. Rhys does an admirable job with the character and keeps him from feeling too bland, giving weight to his terror as he realizes that the island’s curse is quite real. His seemingly impossible choice in the final episode is played quite well and does much to redeem the character’s portrayal from the rest of the series.
While I have noted some of the shortcomings in this series, I want to stress again that I enjoyed it and look forward to the next installment of the trials, tribulations, terrors, and tongue-in-cheek misadventure of this poor cursed community.
