Review: Widow's Bay, "Welcome To Widow's Bay!" | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium's coverage of Apple TV's Widow's Bay, which gets the rare vote of approval of weekly reviews for a new, first season show. Is this just because it works with the need for reviews that extend into June? Or is it because your humble editor has seen the whole season and thinks you'll dig it? Either way, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews—beginning with Zack's take on the second episode—will be exclusively for paid subscribers.

Is this Stephen King’s fault? The first episode of Widow’s Bay doesn’t say one way or another, but all the signs are there: a small New England coastal town with a collection of twitchy eccentrics—including the neurotic mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys)—menaced by unspeakable supernatural forces is about as King as you can get before the lawsuits kick in. The biggest difference between Bay and something like Needful Things or Salem’s Lot is its focus on humor, largely centered on Rhys’ committed, ingratiating performance. That, and its reticence to get to the monsters, at least in its opening episode.

“Welcome to Widow’s Bay!” starts ominously enough, with a cold open that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen John Carpenter’s The Fog. But while the fog will continue to haunt our characters throughout the episode, its effects are hard to pin down. “Welcome” sets up our main character, establishes his world, and hints at the terrible things that may (or may not) happen to that world in the weeks ahead. It’s a strong, entertaining first episode, but it’s hard not to shake some of those Surf Dracula Blues.

If you’re unfamiliar, “Surf Dracula” is a reference to a tweet by an account called Topher Florence, mocking the way streaming shows hold back on getting to the point as long as possible to justify their existence. As much as I’m on the lookout for King references (and the show definitely has them), the biggest difference between the start of this series and King’s work is that King rarely hedges his bets that long. By the second or third chapter, you usually have some idea of the sort of nightmare you’ll be facing in the pages to come.

Widow’s Bay has a lot of hints in its opening episode, but those hints don’t add up to anything beyond, well, hints. You can call it foreshadowing, and it certainly is similar to that technique, but one of the keys to great foreshadowing is the way it offers you glimpses of something in way that simultaneously obscures and illuminates the subject. In “Welcome,” those glimpses are too scattershot to suggest they add up to anything singular, even when they know they should. There’s lore about the island and some effectively creepy moments, but if the show has a fault, its in clinging to the mystery. The longer it works to set up… something… the more disappointing it’s likely to be when that something manifests as vampires or ghosts or fish-people or what have you.

Still, it’s hard to be too bothered by that when Rhys is running around begging people to stop being idiots. Fans familiar with Rhys from his reserved, melancholic lead performance in The Americans will be delighted to see a whole new side to him here; a nervy, desperate energy drives him from scene to scene as he struggles to do what he thinks is best for Widow’s Bay, no matter what anyone else might tell him otherwise. A lot of the comedy in the episode comes from Loftis bouncing from oddball to oddball, or else trying to convince an out-of-town reporter to ignore the town’s colorful history.

This could’ve been forced or overly manic, but by far the best thing about Widow’s Bay, at least in its first episode, is its town. Rhys is terrific, as is Stephen Root as Wyck, a local convinced that Loftis’ plan to make the town a tourist attraction is going to get a lot of people killed. The show doesn’t reveal an antagonist in its first episode, but the sparring between Loftis and Wyck is immediately engaging, as both actors clearly relish the chance to bounce off one another.

As Patricia, Loftis’s perpetually gloomy mayoral aide, Kate O’Flynn also makes an immediate impression. The show already has a bench of side characters ready and waiting to steal a scene, but the first episode sticks mostly with Loftis. His determination to take a clearly cursed small town and make it the next Martha’s Vineyard creates a tremendous amount of comic energy right out of the gate. Maybe the funniest joke in the episode has him fiercely protesting the reporter’s claim that the town has cannibalism in its history, before pulling back to reveal a well-framed newspaper headline directly contradicting him. 

It’s a neat trick, trading in on our (Stephen King-inspired) assumptions about small New England towns and reframing the threat of disaster in a new light. The show is still clearly interested in unsettling and creeping us out, but the energy derived from all the ominous music and shots of hidden places also serves to heighten the comedy. Loftis serves as both straight man and comic relief, and it's proof of Rhys’s talent that he can pull it off and still make a potentially irritating nebbish into someone we can’t help but root for. (Even when it brings him into direct conflict with Wyck. Eh? Eh?)

As of now, my only real reservation with all of this is that it’s not clear yet exactly what is wrong with Widow’s Bay. Obviously it needs to be something that can support an ongoing series, which means it’s unlikely that it will be a single unified threat. But if we end up with just a collection of familiar scares repurposed in new clothing, it will be all the more of a let-down after such a terrific set up. There’s a lot of potential here. It would just be nice if the people behind the scenes had felt confident enough about where we’re heading to do more than just tease. [Editor's note: This is probably why they aired two episodes to start instead of just one, but I made Zack write separate reviews because episodes are still separate entities no matter how they're released.]

Stray observations

• It’s likely that all the ominous warning signs in “Welcome” are a joke in and of themselves. Widow’s Bay isn’t parody, at least not so far, but there is something funny about the idea of “a peaceful New England coastal town” riddled with this many horrors.
• This may be petty of me, but the people who make these shows do realize that “New England” isn’t just a single place, right? 
• Oh, Loftis has a son. Didn’t mention that. To be honest, as of yet, I don’t entirely care. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to increase Loftis’s ties to the town (especially given the rumor that anyone born in Widow’s Bay dies if they try to move away), but the son doesn’t make much of an initial impression.
• Loftis shouting “There’s something in the fog!” has to be a reference, right? It works perfectly fine as a climax/punchline, but it’s also extremely similar to a line shouted in The Mist.