“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In Widow’s Bay as in the real world, Karl Marx was right. In a sense, Widow’s Bay is a complex metaphor for trying to survive and stay sane in that nightmare world. Life is a horror show, driven by the failures of our dead forefathers, and the cost of putting an end to it may not be one we are willing or able to pay. By fighting it, we are forced — or we choose — to become monsters ourselves.
That’s the fancy-pants, mainland way of looking at this episode. The other way, the island way, is Holy shit, they did human sacrifices depending on the number of times the cursed church bell tolls, and now Loftis is trapped on the island forever because his son Evan is the final descendant of Richard Warren, and as long as he’s alive the sacrifices must continue???
All that and it’s funny, too? To borrow a term from Stephen King: Dear Reader, that’s good TV.
The funny thing is that this isn’t a super-funny episode of Widow’s Bay, or a super scary one, or one that riffs on one or two very specific stories or subgenres. Sure, there are shades of Nope and The Lighthouse here and there, and a twister straight out of The Wizard of Oz, but there’s no one central horror here — no sea hag, no sunset cocktails death ritual, no machete-wielding Boogeyman. Other than Chris Fleming’s untimely demise and the genuinely chilling cold open, this episode feels mostly like set-up for the finale. It’s funny in places and creepy in others, but in both the horror and comedy categories, I’m hoping it’s just the calm before the storm.
In the meantime, it’s still a marvelously made show. The vocal effects for Warren feel like something out of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, and the age makeup holds up extremely well under direct closeups. But even less showy aspects of the episode are striking, like the sharp blue-tinted white light used to illuminate the boat and its cabin, cutting against the digital gloom that often plagues nighttime scenes set at sea on streaming shows. It’s a minor thing, but minor things add up, whether you’re making a show about a haunted island, or actually living on one.
Betty Gilpin is television’s most valuable player. She has that Catherine O’Hara/Philip Seymour Hoffman factor: She’s good in absolutely everything, no matter how good that thing is. To name two recent examples relevant to her work in the first of this week’s two Widow’s Bay episodes, she played a ferocious survivor in Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s brutal ordeal, American Primeval, and a momentary First Lady in Mike Makowsky and Matt Ross’s creepily relevant assassination drama Death by Lightning. The former felt like a project written with her in mind, the latter one like one where her character was an afterthought. Regardless, she’s excellent in both. Unsurprisingly, she’s excellent here.
So is Hamish Linklater. (Jeez. Is this the most “actors beloved by TV critics” cast ever assembled or what?) His most relevant recent work is Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan’s story of a small island fishing town beset by evil forces, in which Linklater plays a God-fearing religious protector of the village with a sinister secret of his own. Sound familiar?
But for the most part, Tom’s trip is depicted through what we don’t see or hear. Smash cuts to black punctuate the action, which repeatedly resumes with Tom suddenly finding himself in some other place with some other character and no recollection of how they got together and then got where they currently are. From Todd’s house, to his office, to the historical society, to a meeting full of townsfolk furious with his curfew, to a meeting suddenly empty of townsfolk furious with his curfew (Tom’s only clues to their absence are dry erase marker in his hand, a message on a whiteboard, and a trashcan full of his vomit), back to the historical society, to Rosemary’s car, to a gas station, and finally to his house — he’s getting booted through time and space by the drug like he’s Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-five.
With characters this well drawn and this locked down this early, there’s almost no limit to where you can go. Look at Cheers or The Golden Girls: Those characters were those characters immediately, and thus their pilot episodes contain some of the funniest jokes in the entire run of the series. Kind of reminds you of a show we’re watching right now, right?
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.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. It’s starting….Close the port. Shutter the businesses. Sound the siren….You refuse to accept our history, to accept the truth, and I’ve lived with that for years, but now it’s gonna get people killed….The island has lain dormant, but she’s waking up, and that’s when bad things happen. You think the fog out there is natural? No, it ain’t natural. It already took Shep and it will take the rest of us tonight. It’s a haunt!”
It may not look like it to read it, but this is some of the funniest dialogue I’ve heard on TV all year. Delivered by the legendary character actor Stephen Root as Wyck, the eccentric old harbormaster of a quaint New England fishing village called Widow’s Bay, it’s a warning about impending death and damnation…and I got no further than the third sentence in the speech, “It’s starting,” before bursting out laughing. A guy who talks only in the voice of bad Stephen King knockoffs from the 1980s? Why, he’s speaking my language!
