Heading into the 78th Emmy Awards, “Widow’s Bay” seems anything but cursed.
Whether or not human sacrifice was involved, Katie Dippold’s Apple TV horror-comedy emerged from last weekend’s Emmy ceremonies (formerly called the Creative Arts Emmys) with eight awards — guest actress (Betty Gilpin), casting, cinematography, music composition, music supervision, production design, sound editing and sound mixing — and a definitive statuary lead. (“The Pitt” and “Pluribus” each got four.)
Buoyed by universally great reviews and fan obsession, it could well beat HBO’s beloved “Hacks” in the best comedy category, but if there were an award for Outstanding Representation of This Moment in Time, “Widow’s Bay” would win hands down.
With a president who regularly toggles between the absurd — he hates windmills, loves inflation and wants to annex Greenland — and the authoritarian as he appoints key policymakers who seem plucked from creepshow comics (not even Stephen King could have conjured an anti-vaccine national head of health and human services who has a brain worm and proudly eats roadkill), it’s difficult, at times, to know whether to laugh or scream.
Outlandish conspiracy theories have become our new local legends, “witch hunt” a regular rallying cry and phantoms we once hoped were dead or banished — Nazis, white nationalists, beef tallow, the measles — now once again move freely among us.
Is it any wonder that “Widow’s Bay,” which miraculously serves up equal portions of jump scares and belly laughs, is this season’s hottest series?
Horror, always popular, is generally having a big moment, becoming at once more pervasive and more direct. In films like “Get Out,” “Sinners,” “Leviticus,” “His House,” “The Substance” and “Backrooms,” the actual monsters of racism, homophobia, displacement, misogyny and alienation are only thinly disguised in supernatural or sci-fi metaphor.
“Widow’s Bay,” leaning into comedy, goes old school, conjuring familiar spectres that knowingly nod to “Jaws,” “Psycho,” the canonical works of King and John Carpenter, and other touchstones of cultural anxiety.
So many, and so blatantly, that it initially borders on absurd.
Which is exactly how Widow Bay’s new mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) feels. The only town on a small island off the New England coast, with no cell service, lots of wicker and a doctor who blithely smokes in his office, Widow’s Bay is as isolated in time as it is in place. We don’t need an unsettling soundtrack to know that bad things happen here, but Tom sees nothing but potential.
Sure, the local museum proudly displays the island’s history of cannibalism, witch burning, serial killers and often devastating weather system. But look, there’s also loads of Ye Olde charm, beautiful beaches, pristine forests and a brand-new cappuccino machine! With a little effort and some decent publicity, Widow’s Bay could be the next Bar Harbor or Martha’s Vineyard!
If only his dour and prickly assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) would stop mentioning her encounter with the murderous Boogeyman. If only professional old salt Wyck (Stephen Root) would quit with the doomsday prophecies about the fog being a sign of the island waking from malevolent slumber. If only the church bells would stop ringing even though their pull chains have been locked away for years.
We, of course, know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Tom and his desperate belief that everything is going to be better soon and any town founded in the 1600s is going to seem a little haunted.
Tom is certainly haunted. All anxious eyes and frayed good cheer, Rhys makes him instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever desperately clung to the belief that there’s nothing that a new coat of paint and a positive attitude won’t fix. It’s tough to not root for him, with his twitchy, self-convincing belief that a well-placed travel piece will save the town’s citizenry, who should be more intent on fixing the roads and demanding decent Wi-Fi than maintaining legends about a zombie-making fog or a curse that kills any Widow Bay’s native who dares set foot on the mainland.
(Dippold’s years writing for “Parks and Recreation” are put to good use in creating a mayor’s office defined by bureaucratic apathy and discursive bickering — O’Flynn’s Patricia is “Widow’s Bay’s” version of April Ludgate.)
Tom gets his travel piece and his tourists, but he also learns that attempting to remain “reasonable” can be its own form of delusion, an indication that you haven’t grasped the gravity of the situation.
In other words, sinister clowns and predatory sea hags are just silly legends until they’re actually trying to kill you.
Which is the series’ biggest joke and most resonant message.
Deftly wielding humor and horror in equal measure, “Widow’s Bay” captures the welter of emotions many people feel at this moment and how those emotions are expressed: Laughter certainly helps us cope with life’s many trials, but when the world is literally on fire, screaming is the only appropriate response.
So when, like Tom, we can no longer pretend that truly terrible things aren’t happening, what should we do next? Face our fear and root it out, even if it means excavating the hideous rot of actual history? Or go about our business, hoping that they happen to other people?
Not that “Widow’s Bay” aims to be existential. It is a wildly entertaining series, chock full of nostalgia and anchored by a cast that provides a masterclass in genre-blind performance. (Gilpin won her Emmy for playing one of the town’s early settlers in a flashback episode.)
“Widow’s Bay” occasionally flirts with satire, but it settles down with self-aware sincerity. Every moment, whether dominated by a “Halloween”-inspired ghoul or the grammar-correcting banter of mutually exasperated colleagues, is played straight and for all their initial nods to trope, every character is uniquely and thoroughly human. Believable people with reasonable reactions forced to cope with seemingly unbelievable and unreasonable situations.
Comedy and horror each leverage recognizable sources of tension to provide a reflexive physical and emotional release. A party gone spectacularly wrong gets a laugh, a sinister figure at the window prompts a scream. Getting a double dose is a joy — we need as much tension-diffusing release as we can get these days
Because terrible things often seem quite absurd until they have you by the throat.
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