How do u properly f*ck up a cozy town?
Widow’s Bay is everything a mystery-thriller-comedy about cynical suppression should be. A NO Spoilers trail of the comedy-horror splicing success.
Only a few episodes have dropped of Katie Dippold’s new sinister seaside apple tv show centering on an obscure mayor’s filibustering attempts to boost tourism on his lackluster island in spite of rampant allegations and substantiated sightings of cursed activity leaving everyone on tenterhooks.
My favorite of these sightings happens in episode 3 and involves Mr. Mayor and a reclining chair, but that’s among a hefty handful of foolhardy, borderline slapstick scares, all nowhere near as unsurprising as finding out Dippold is a comedy writer and Hiro Murai, of Atlanta fame, is the director behind her vision.
These MERE first three episodes have brewed up such a strong opening half that I feel comfortable saying this is the best show streaming right now, and for no reason stronger than its robust helping of wry, sardonic jokes and genuinely wicked, skin crawling beasts, brutes and ogres propagating the island’s curse and making an absolute fool of the mayor, who doesn’t believe any of the voodoo shit is real. A perfect “villain” with a cause: COVER IT UP
This show is Katie Dippold’s approach to the question what would happen if we fucked up cozy little town? And it answers first, with a rotation of considerable genre classics.
A histrionic yet charming man in charge
The foreboding feeling of violent, unceremonious doom
A mostly complacent group of townspeople slowly getting high off the fumes of anarchy
But it's the way these components are wielded that makes it such an intoxicatingly balanced blend, in no small part thanks to the skillset Murai once brought to Atlanta. As he states, “The horror of this show comes from these characters interiority” … “an anxiety or fear they're suppressing,” which serves as the source of both the comedy and the horror. This builds “a tone where these anxious and overwhelmed people” express their emotionality “externally through tension or fear."
Character is the blueprint and like all wondrous series-length concoctions, the landing pad for great comedy-horror is minuscule. According to program creator Katie Dippold, the journey to stick it, finding the perfectly suitable slant of comedy and scares, was long and intrepid. Unsurprisingly, the show started in a more comedy-heavy territory, but her proclivity for the horror genre tempered the mix to align with her taste: a pb&j with emphasis on the pb. In fact, she didn’t care for a pure comedy version of the show at all (I mean who on earth wants a jelly-only sandwich). And to the brilliant credit of the final product, it really does thrive off its moments of unfettered calamity, only flavored for sport with the highest hanging fruit off the humor tree. She wanted to stray as far away from parody as possible.
“I want to watch a show that’s taken seriously and you’re really invested in the characters.”
And that she did.
Matthew Rhys portrays Tom Loftis, the island mayor; a slightly squirrely figure whose lack of constituent respect generates so much ridicule that it fuels 80% of the comedic atmosphere. With a primary objective to obscure the strange happenings of the island, his general vibe of uneasiness has thoroughly mutated into an ingratiating clumsiness even his staff can hardly work past. But as a “widowed” father of one, his efforts preserve a moral purity that makes him easy to root for, especially since the absurdity of the town horrors are hard to believe outright. But, this purity doesn’t shield us from the compromising lengths he’s willing to go to curry favor with the town, everything except confronting the truth: an ever-lingering, cursed truth that he turns a blind eye to every day. The fodder of old wives’ tales, passed from household to household since the town’s colonization, sowing fear across every inch of the island and taking lives in the process. The catastrophic a trail his leadership leaves behind, is as demonstrable as the horror of this show and the thematic gumption follow suit.
Katie says she became a comedy writer as a response to the “horrors of life,” …“making jokes because the situation was tense.” Part of the joy she gets from watching a horror movie is the cathartically amusing comic relief that comes from delighting in the “magic trick” crafted on screen. That delight maps out crisp and clean onto the world built of Widow’s Bay, a show I suspect nods at the very real life horror of feckless leadership and multicultural denialism in this country, a corollary of a cynically suppressed outlook on the world that forsakes any sense of the part you play in shifting the narrative.
To draw a parallel, I’ll cite a line from a piece by Current Affairs, aptly titled The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon, on The Tonight Show’s empty husk of a late night host, not at all dissimilar to Mayor Tom Loftis or the control covetous blights in charge.
“…insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, … is itself an aggressively political act”
Quotes and process detail from HOLLYWOOD FIRST LOOK and Jonatan Blomberg from MovieZine
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