The 'Parks and Rec'/Stephen King Mashup We Never Knew We Wanted Is Here

I went into Widow’s Bay completely cold, knowing only that it starred Matthew Rhys and that it streams on Apple TV+. It took me a full episode to really understand what was going on, because the series feels like a small-town comedy — think Pawnee or Port Wenn, the fictional Cornish village at the heart of the original Doc Martin, transplanted to Maine à la Fox’s remake, Best Medicine — expertly commingled with the oeuvre of Stephen King. The first episode feels like a gentle parody of The Mist before the second goes full 1408 (or The Shining) with a Pennywise-like killer clown cameo that earns its jump scare.

But it’s also funny. Not Scary Movie funny (not that Scary Movie is particularly funny). More like a small-town mayor trying to improve tourism on a New England coastal island, only instead of dealing with the lack of WiFi or the surplus of quirky townies — although, that, too — the mayor has to contend with an actual goddamn curse that rolled in with the fog and resurrected the island’s haunted past.

And the reason why it probably feels so much like a haunted Pawnee is that it comes from Katie Dippold, a longtime writer on Parks and Recreation, who also penned the Paul Feig Ghostbusters and The Heat. She’s a comedy writer who clearly understands Stephen King’s brand of supernatural horror, and she has a hell of a director in Hiro Murai (Atlanta, The Bear) to help set the tone. The pairing is quietly inspired: Murai has always excelled at finding the dread lurking just beneath the mundane, and here he gets to let it fully surface.

That tone is everything, because Widow’s Bay is the kind of horror-comedy where you might imagine Parks’ Ben Wyatt trying to revive a dying old town only to be confronted by a revenant and a cozy hotel for tourists that just happens to be haunted by decades of mysterious deaths.

Matthew Rhys plays Tom Loftis perfectly down the middle, too — a skeptical mayor from the Mainland who becomes increasingly convinced that the town’s lore is more than myth, including the not-insignificant detail that no one born in Widow’s Bay ever escapes alive. After convincing a New York Times travel writer to highlight the town’s charms and position it as the next Nantucket, Tom is left with the unenviable task of trying to unring that bell, because Widow’s Bay is, it turns out, a supernatural death trap.

Despite the small-town comedy vibe, the scares are legit — all the more so because we quickly grow attached to the quirky denizens of Widow’s Bay, played by a murderers’ row of character actors (Kevin Carroll, Dale Dickey, Jeff Hiller, Toby Huss, Connor Ratliff, Tim Baltz, Kate O’Flynn, and even friend of the site Olli Haaskivi). It’s so much fun to watch a horror series that is somehow both comforting and yet one where you still occasionally have to watch with your hands over your eyes.

The creepy-cozy vibe is specific enough to feel original, while Dippold and Murai — with heavy assists from an ensemble cast led by Rhys and a quietly devastating Kate O’Flynn — have conjured something that’s harder to pull off than it looks: a horror series that’s actually warm. It’s good stuff, and the mix of horror subgenres keeps the series from growing stale.

‘Widow’s Bay’ is currently streaming on Apple TV.