Matthew Rhys in 'Widow's Bay.' Photos Courtesy of Apple TV+ Logo text The original pilot for Widow’s Bay was written by Katie Dippold nearly 20 years ago as a spec submission for Parks and Recreation, the beloved NBC sitcom which she went on to write for over three seasons. Years later, after her debut feature script The Heat went into production with director Paul Feig (before going on to gross nearly $230 million worldwide), Dippold started pitching Widow’s Bay out. This iteration of the show was relatively jokey. “I don’t think we’d have a flashback episode; I don’t think there’d be real tension and scares,” Dippold says. “It would just be so different.”
Related Stories
TV 'Slow Horses' Season 6: Apple Drops First Look at Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden Return
TV Matthew Rhys Reveals He and Dave Annable Unsuccessfully Pitched a 'Brothers & Sisters' Holiday Special
Dippold tells The Hollywood Reporter that in the early 2010s, Amazon, then the nascent streamer behind distinctive half-hours like Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle, was about to make her an offer to make that version of Widow’s Bay. She said no and pulled it before they could pull the trigger. “I just had this bad feeling. I put a pin in it. I just knew it wasn’t ready,” she says. “I knew I hadn’t thought enough about the show or the world.”
Here we are in 2026, and the debut season of Widow’s Bay has emerged as something of a word-of-mouth phenomenon on Apple TV+, blending layered comedy with honest-to-God jumpscares. (The season-one finale airs this coming Wednesday.) Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro recently posted that it “may very well be the best streaming series in a long time… and hands down one of the most mesmerizing acts of narrative prestidigitation in horror.” Ben Stiller has dubbed it “excellent.” Jonathan Bailey called it “incredible top-tier television.” The New York Times just named it the best new show of the year.
Clearly, Dippold was right to take her time. “This is the thing I’m most passionate about, that I’ve thought about so deeply for so long,” the creator and showrunner says. “Every time I went to the East Coast over the years, I’d bring a notebook and think about it. I used to go to the Museum of Natural History in New York and look at the glass display cases and imagine what it would be like if that was Widow’s Bay. It helped unlock different kinds of things. I’m so glad this is how it turned out.”
We’re inclined to agree.
Hamish Linklater (right) as Richard Warren. “I rewrote like crazy,” Dippold says of the decade-plus since that Amazon near-offer. “There was a lot of trial and error.”
The finished Widow’s Bay product stars Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, mayor of the titular island town, a cozy New England escape akin to Martha’s Vineyard. At least, this is Tom’s pitch as the series opens, when he welcomes a popular travel writer to write an article that will increase tourism for the summer. The problem is that everyone in the community other than him believes Widow’s Bay to be haunted; at some point in the season — probably when he’s tasked with killing the town’s centuries-old founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) — Tom is convinced by this too. Unfortunately, by this point, the tourists have arrived.
“Loftis is always trying to prove that he’s a leader that should be respected,” Dippold says. “The goal is always to make that as hard for him as possible and really put him through the wringer.”
Episode to episode, the show takes on many forms. It’s a clever monster-of-the-week horror extravaganza, with mythic killers ranging from the Boogeyman to the Sea Hag. A probing character study, with entire episodes devoted to Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), Tom’s assistant who’s treated like a freakish pariah by her neighbors before emerging as an unlikely action hero. A workplace sitcom, as Tom strains to maintain normalcy with a staff including Patricia and other misanthropic employees like Dale (Jeff Hiller) and Rosemary (Dale Dickey). Also, for one episode, it’s an ingenious slice of darkly funny gothic horror, taking the action back to 1702 and platforming a striking guest turn from Betty Gilpin.
Hiro Murai (right) directing in the mayor’s office, beside Dale Dickey as Rosemary. For Hiro Murai (Atlanta), executive producer and director of half of the season’s 10 episodes (including the pilot and next week’s finale), this elasticity speaks to Widow’s Bay’s appeal — it embraces the creative opportunities presented by episodic TV as others often forget.
“I feel like for the last couple years, television like this was trying to be 10-hour movies,” Murai says. “There’s something about situating this as a workplace sitcom…but treating it deadly serious that I found really appealing. Each episode is basically a standalone movie that’s kind of doing its own genre, and it was a real puzzle trying to fit that conceit into a half-hour box. But that’s also the joy of the show.”
Dippold sees the show’s breakout success this way: “I will say this, the show really goes for it. I think a lot of shows are a little bit cooler and maybe don’t want to put themselves out there as much. I’m relieved that this big swing hasn’t led to absolute humiliation. But I also think you have to risk humiliation to make something people like.”
There’s also the eerie authenticity of the setting; where so many shows are now comfortably (and affordably) set up in hubs like Vancouver or Georgia, Widow’s Bay looks and sounds utterly New England. There was briefly a chance that Widow’s Bay would shoot up in Canada and take advantage of the region’s tax incentives. But Murai needed to capture the feeling of “the oldest places in America,” as he puts it, and when they scouted Massachusetts, they knew right then that there was nowhere else to go.
Jeff Hiller as Dale, with Katie Dippold. The first location the team visited was a colonial house that’d been turned into a museum. Centuries-old paintings of spooky babies hung on the wall. “We asked what the paintings were for and they said, ‘Well, back in the day, babies didn’t live very long, so whenever a baby passed away, they would paint a portrait of the baby just to remind you,’” Murai says. “There’s something so haunting about it.”
This translated to the immersive, playful design of Widow’s Bay. “I hadn’t been to the States since I was 15 and I’m like 40 now, so it was a long time, and yet when I got there, it just felt very recognizable,” says British star Kate O’Flynn. “Walking onto the set they built, the whole world immediately felt right.”
“I wanted it to feel like you want to go to this place and then also feel like you’re not getting enough of it,” Dippold explains. “Even though you’ve seen things this season, there’s always nooks and crannies to explore, and more history you haven’t heard. I wanted the audience to want to lean into it.”
**
Rhys carries the show on screen from scene to scene and episode to episode. He didn’t have much of a clue as to how all this would come together. “When I first read it, I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? I’ve never read anything like this, and I’ve certainly never played anything remotely like this,’” Rhys says. “When I got on my first Zoom with Hiro, he just said, ‘Look, we’re not making a comedy. We’re not making horror. We’re just going to create a real world with real people that have real backstories — and we’ll play it for real.’”
The Welsh native won an Emmy for his nuanced turn in The Americans and is also Emmy-contending this year for his mercurial portrayal of a maybe-wife-killer in The Beast in Me. In Widow’s Bay, he shows off his comedy chops while always grounding and deepening the material. In his hands, Tom can be buffoonish, tragic, doomed and heroic at once.
Kevin Carroll as Sheriff Clemmons. Not that this was easy to pull off: “I’ve never done this. Going broad felt unnerving in ways that felt false in a way — I was like, ‘That feels fake to me,’” Rhys says of his performance. This continued when he started watching the screeners before turning them off. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I can’t watch this.’ I felt like I was watching Harold Lloyd.’” He also worried, in the relatively slapstick aspects of the show, that he was doing a cheap Charlie Chaplin impression — ironic in retrospect, since his deft Widow’s Bay work has been praised in viral social-media posts making that exact comparison.
Rhys saw one such comment, referring to a screwball-worthy shot of him falling off a bench aboard a creaky boat: “Christ, if I’m going to be compared to anyone, I’ll take Chaplin any day of the week,” Rhys says. As to what Dippold observed in her lead actor there: “I didn’t think of that being a funny moment. It wasn’t in the script that he falls off in a silly way. I don’t even think Matthew is trying to be funny. He’s so tapped into this character, who’s out of his league on his boat — and so, that is the way that guy would fall.”
The peerless ensemble around Rhys consists of old comedy friends of Dippold’s, like Hiller and Neil Casey, as well as veteran character actors including Dickey, Stephen Root and Kevin Carroll. But the singular O’Flynn, best known for her work in Mike Leigh movies and the short-lived My Lady Jane, has emerged in her own right as a fan-favorite. “What I saw in Patricia was the bravery and the smarts, even as she fumbles quite a few things,” the actress says. “I’m getting to be kind of a scream queen, which was not something I ever expected would come my way. So to get to do it? I just feel like a kid in a sweets shop.”
Kate O’Flynn (center) as Patricia. This week’s second-to-last episode sees the conditions around Widow’s Bay deteriorating, as the reignited Warren curse on the island wreaks havoc. A raging storm forces everyone into a shelter; the fates of our characters appear imperiled. But rather than further ratchet up the stakes in the final minutes, the episode closes with Rosemary exhaustively — and rather hilariously — going over an extensive genealogical document for Tom and Patricia. She presents some wild Widow’s Bay lore — and also reveals the identity of the last remaining Warren descendant, who may be unwittingly keeping the curse alive: Tom’s elderly secretary, Ruth (K Callan).
“It’s the penultimate episode, and yet the climax has to be Rosemary monologuing after we see all these setpieces of the storm — it needed to deliver, and it was a very counterintuitive move,” Murai says. “Katie was just like, ‘It just feels right for us to be in this high-stakes storm of the century mode, and then all of a sudden have to sit through a presentation on a projector for eight minutes.’”
This sets up a rich moral dilemma for Tom going into next week’s closer. “I said to Hiro, ‘This is the most dense drama I’ve done in a very long time,’” Rhys teases of the finale’s contents. “I’m coming off the back of Beast and Me, and I was like, ‘This feels heavier than that!’ But the drama becomes magnified and far richer as a result of it.”
This is how Dippold works, though — it’s why Widow’s Bay feels like nothing else on TV, and why so many are taking notice. When asked about how she wanted to land the plane, ahead of a hopeful second season, the creator puts it this way: “The heart of the show, as I look at it, is: I think life is a nightmare. It’s just an absolute nightmare.
“The reason I am a comedy writer is because I feel that way and I’ve always been an anxious person, and so if I’m upset about something or something terrible happened and someone makes a risky joke that makes me laugh, that is my favorite feeling in the world,” Dippold continues. “That’s what the show is to me. Just as you’re scared and feel bad, something makes you laugh, because that is also life — the ridiculous absurdity of life.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
