Below is one of this spooky season’s biggest shows, literally: Set on the coast of Newfoundland, it relies on sweeping vistas of the Atlantic shoreline, massive icebergs hundreds of miles from where they belong, and something very, very big lurking under the water’s surface.
It’s also very familiar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A tiny fishing village in the Northeast is beset by strange phenomena that leave people missing, mad, or dead, and only one desperate man and his friends can stop the horror. That’s right, it’s also roughly the premise of Widow’s Bay, not to mention the dozens of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft stories and imitations that inspired it. And while Widow’s Bay operates in a comedic register that Below doesn’t possess (at least not intentionally), it’s hard to watch this new series without comparing it to its Emmy-festooned recent predecessor given their many narrative, character, and setting overlaps. So with all six episodes of Below now streaming on Netflix, we’re taking a survey of how creator Jesse McKeown’s and star Josh Hartnett’s Canadian maritime monster party stacks up against Katie Dippold’s New England horror comedy. In this cross-border, cross-streamer rivalry, which is the real village of the damned good television?
Tags: below, horror, TV, TV reviews, vulture, widow's bay