‘Widow’s Bay’ Is the Best Stephen King Mixtape Ever

Up along the edges of New England, just a ferry ride away from the coastline, lies the quaint island town of Widow’s Bay. It’s populated by working-class locals and families that go back several generations, the kind of place perfect for summer vacations and killer lobster rolls. Go past the Salty Whale, one of the better restaurants on the island, and you’ll find the historical center, which is dedicated to preserving Widow’s Bay legacy. Yes, it has a checkered past — pity about the cannibalism-in-the-church incident back in the 1800s — but what town that dates back to the beginning of this great American experiment doesn’t?

A New York Times travel writer thinks this place could be the next Martha’s Vineyard, if only more people knew about it. The town’s new mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), would settle for the burg being the new Bar Harbor. Both his constituents and the folks who work for him down at City Hall think he’s a little too ambitious, to be honest. But Tom has big plans for turning this modest dot on the coastal map into a tourist destination. It’s just a pity about, y’know, that unfortunate, centuries-old curse, which seems to keep belching up all sorts of horrifying phenomenons…

The early logline on Widow’s Bay, the new Apple TV+ show which drops its first two episodes on May 29, is that it’s “Parks & Recreation meets Stephen King” — an overall synopsis that makes sense on the surface. You can see echoes of Leslie Knope’s try-hard bureaucrat in Rhys’s mayor, perpetually frustrated in turning the fortunes of this economically struggling community around. Ditto his second-in-command, a mousy and socially awkward deputy named Patricia (Kate O’Flynn, killing it in every scene) who shares a certain unflappable, chin-up quality with Pawnee’s favorite daughter. Loftis’s office is stocked with muted versions of the usual sitcom supporting kooks and freaks, from Dale Dickey’s flinty veteran to Somebody Somewhere‘s Jeff Hiller perpetually bewildered clerk. And the locals run the gamut of regional eccentrics, with Stephen Root — an actor who, it has been scientifically proven, ups the quality of every project he’s in by 33.3 percent — making a meal out of an old salty dog in the same manner that Nick Offerman did with Ron Swanson.

But it’s the Stephen King part that really gets emphasized here, and while he’s not directly involved with the show, creator Katie Dippold and her collaborators have taken the raw materials of the author’s bestsellers and run with them. If nothing else, Widow’s Bay plays like a mixtape of the Master of the Macabre’s work, compiling stock horror archetypes and scenarios before running them through a mondo bizarro filter. A haunted inn allows the series to riff on both The Shining and It in one fell swoop. A legendary sea hag sets her sights on Loftis, and let’s just say she has a… unique way of killing her victims. A vintage book on how to throw a party, complete with Eisenhower-era drawings, turns out to have a secondary agenda once you read between the lines. A reanimated corpse turns out to be a pain in the ass. Even slasher flicks get the remix treatment.

Matthew Rhys in ‘Widow’s Bay.’Apple TV+

The show scratches the itch that both Castle Rock and Welcome to Derry couldn’t seem to reach, yet Widow’s Bay isn’t interested in I.P. fan fiction. There’s a glorious eccentricity that hovers over its blend of deadpan sitcom and spooky-tale dread, and a willingness to fuck with your head that harkens back to a different, less safe era of programming. Not to mention a different corporate brand — the best thing you can say about this Apple TV+ series is that it doesn’t feel like an Apple TV+ series. For every Slow Horses and Severance, there are seven other shows on the streamer that have the patina of Prestige TV without any of the heft or depth associated with the term. This first season could have been lifted from the golden age of FX, which isn’t surprising given that Hiro Murai — who’s an executive producer and directed close to half of the 10 episodes — was one of the key creative minds behind Atlanta.

Widow’s Bay shares that landmark’s love of surrealism and formalism, offbeat sense of humor (asked about the town’s witch trials back in the day, the resident historian notes they view that dark period with a “great sense of pride… we caught ’em, we burned ’em…”), and lack of fear in regards to getting freaky. It’s also a reminder that, as with fortunes, behind every seeming paradise lurks a crime or two. When the series finally gets around to a flashback episode (directed by Pearl‘s Ti West) and digs into the Puritan roots behind what’s happening on the island, you get a sense of how the nation we’ve built is constructed on the bones of what Greil Marcus termed “the old, weird America.” You can’t outrun the ghosts of your past. You can’t even tame them in the name of tourism. The best you can do is honor the restless spirits that have come and gone before you. Or at the very least, make sure all those bodies stay buried.