There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss it joke in the series premiere of Widow’s Bay. It’s one I didn’t even mention in my review, because on this show there’s simply a lot of good stuff to talk about. Mayor Tom Loftis is turning the page of his wall calendar, which features pictures of wolves. The month of July, however, is a picture of a car wreck. On one level, this is just a funny sight gag, one of many sprinkled in to show that things in Widow’s Bay are a little bit…off. On the other hand, dear God why is there a full-page photo of a crashed car in a wall calendar?
Two episodes deep into Widow’s Bay, I’m starting to understand just how fruitful an approach this whole “is it funny, or, if you stop and think about it, is it actually deeply disturbing?” thing is going to be.
Take Tom’s stay at THE INN, which doesn’t get an official name but which I feel merits the scary all-caps treatment. Tom and Bechir the sheriff (who’s leaving town as soon as he can) stop harbormaster Wyck from nailing the place shut, not that he’s any better at this than the Dude was at trying to keep Jackie Treehorn’s goons out of his apartment. That New York Times travel article actually turned out even better than Tom had hoped — the writer’s line about the island being the next Martha’s Vineyard actually made it into print! — and he needs any and all lodging places open for business for the coming tourist influx, which means Wyck’s in the way.
In a rage, Tom calls Wyck a “dumb hick.” He then stands there, realizing the grave political miscalculation he’s just made, as Wyck screams at hims from an increasing and eventually comical distance as the car drives away. In order to make it up to the aggrieved townsfolk, Tom agrees to stay overnight at the Inn himself to prove Wyck doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he says, in pure horror movie character lingo, “THE INN IS NOT RIGHT!”
Provided with a checklist of haunted spots to check out and superstitions to test, Tom negotiates a drink at the “honor bar” with the innkeeper, Kurt (Neil Casey), who won’t stay overnight at the place himself but watches the honor bar with a security camera, and checks off item after item — except the basement crawlspace, which is nasty and claustrophobic even if you don’t believe in ghosts.
It’s during this stay that you start to notice how prevalent those calendar-style gags are. Even when they’re not pointed out by Tom himself, the paintings in the background depict uniformly unhappy or unfortunate figures. Why were they pained? Who hung them? The welcome video that plays on the hotel’s old cathode-ray televisions shows an old man welcoming you to Widow’s Bay, then receding into the distance in a shot that seemingly won’t end for hours — except if you switch it on at the moment a strange shadowed figure stands in the far distance in a classic monumental horror-image, and then the old man reappears and says “COME WITH ME.”
The board games in the bar, all of them a minimum of 60 years old, have disturbing titles like Daddy’s Home, She Shouldn’t Have Said That!, RUN, and Teeth (the box contains only a pair of pliers). When Tom, whose father we learn was an abusive alcoholic, plays Daddy’s Home with William (Tim Baltz), the hotel’s other guest (whose presence initially freaks him out), the game pieces include a belt, a baseball bat, and a bottle of whiskey. William himself, whose old-fashioned business attire gives the game away right away, lurches from friendly good cheer to wishing all townies would burn in hell on a dime.
It’s clear to us, the people who are watching a horror comedy but aren’t in one, that William is a ghost. Even so, when he finally assaults Tom in the clown costume he wore as a serial killer in that crawl space — a simultaneous reference to Stephen King’s It, Stephen King’s The Shining, and John Wayne Gacy’s storage needs — it’s still scary. It’s not going to keep you up at night, a show this funny isn’t meant to. But it’s no fun to watch when it’s happening, right?
Putting aside outright parodies like the Scary Movie franchise, horror comedies tend to derive their “horror” element from a combination of jump scares, splatter, and old-fashioned monster movie/creature feature effects — your Evil Dead 2s, your Lost Boyses, your Little Shops of Horror. They do not often reference Kubrick, or include analog horror that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those creepy Adult Swim Infomercials from over a decade ago now, which in some ways feel to me like an influence here. To be blunt, they’re kinda stupid. Widow’s Bay’s horror sense is as sharp as its sense of humor.
Not to mention its casting. Jeez Louise, Toby Huss is in this thing too? An actor who elevates all the material he’s ever been given — the cult classic show Halt and Catch Fire was literally rewritten to beef up his character because the creators didn’t want to waste him — Huss appears as the village priest, who must attend to the case of his church bell ringing in the middle of the night despite the fact that it’s been chained in place. The church’s records indicate that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE if this happens, though we don’t know what yet. (What we do know is that between Toby Huss, Matthew Rhys, Stephen Root, and Dale Dickey, this show is an Ann Dowd or a Margo Martindale away from making every TV critic in America do the full Vince McMahon reaction meme.)
In the end, after innkeeper Kurt agrees to step inside the Inn’s most cursed room and appears to have a brief unexplained excursion through time as a result, the crew discover black mold behind the room’s wallpaper and chalk everything up to that. But Tom knows he’s inviting disaster if he lets this big tourist season happen now, and he’s doing it anyway. He’s moved into mayor-from-Jaws territory rather than boss-from-The Office territory. Both are pretty funny, but only one of them gets people killed. What a smart comedy, to find that balance so fast, and dance so deftly along it.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.