The Cutprice Guignol

Widow’s Bay is not a show about hunting the supernatural – it’s a show about urgently trying to look the other direction while the supernatural waves its arms around three feet away, and I love it.

Widow’s Bay is, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, the kind of show I have been waiting for.

Not just because it’s horror, though of course, I always love to see a bit of the supernatural making its way into the mainstream, or because it’s Matthew Rhys, though you could reasonably assume that too, given that I’m a woman in my thirties. No, Widow’s Bay scratches another very specific itch for me, but I’ll get to that – for now, let’s talk a bit about TV’s best current horror-comedy, and just why it works as brilliantly as it does.

Created by Katie Dippold, Widow’s Bay was never going to be much of a hard sell for me – I mean, I’m a sucker for small-town horror stories, and the cast alone would have been enough to get me signed up. Matthew Rhys stars as Tom Loftis, the mayor of the small island community of Widow’s Bay, as he navigates an incoming tourist season he hopes to make the best of all time – well, as long as the island’s long, storied history of the horrible doesn’t get in the way, of course. If you haven’t seen Matthew Rhys in The Americans (and if not, what are you doing with your life?), then an excellent supporting cast including Dale Dickey, Stephen Root, and Toby Huss should be enough to convince me. And I would be remiss here if I didn’t take a second to rhapsodize about Kate O’Flynn as Patricia, Tom’s assistant, TV’s premier little weirdo, and pretty much my favourite part of every show she’s been in.

But Widow’s Peak, if you do have any doubts going in, is pretty much pitch-perfect comedy-horror – and, now we’re halfway through the first season, I need to talk to you a little about it so I can be certain that we get a season to. If a small community lends itself to anything, it’s this sense of the concentrated absurd that pairs well with both comedy and horror, and Widow’s Bay polishes both to perfection. Matthew Rhys gives a masterclass in Various Microexpressions of Annoyance and Frustration as he attempts to balance his own prospects and the town’s, the atmosphere somewhere between Parks & Recreation and Storm of the Century. It wears its influences on its sleeve, cheeky Stephen King books tucked into the donation pile, but what it does best is scratch an itch that I have had for a long time when it comes to TV horror.

I have long been bemoaning the death of the monster-of-the-week show in genre television, and I feel like Widow’s Bay is the closest thing we’re going to get to it for a while. Because, yes, there’s serialized storytelling here, an overarching plot about the town’s supernatural history, but there’s also, week-to-week, a different paranormal roadblock thrown in the way of a member of the town’s planning committee. It’s less ghost-hunting as it is ghost-aggressively-ignoring, as the supernatural encroaches further and further into the community while the main characters try to keep their gaze pointedly fixed in the other direction. I love it as a contrast to more traditional monster-of-the-week shows, like Supernatural or The X-Files, where lead characters seek out the paranormal as part of the life’s purpose. Here, they’re just trying to get home from the pub without being cursed by a sea hag, the supernatural as much inconvenience as it is horror.

And the horror, when it comes, is actually pretty damn effective. In this era of post-modern horror – for as much as I love it, and I do – it’s really fun to see a show play the hits of the small-town horror story in the way that Widow’s Bay does. A serial killer in a haunted hotel, a sinister figure on the road at night, spells, spooks, incantations, rituals – it’s all here, delivered with exceptional polish and a real sense of gleeful love for the genre. Hiro Murai, who has directed most of the show so far, can set up and knock out joke after joke, but when it comes to the horror, the show takes itself very seriously – there’s some genuinely effective scares here, from Tom’s waterbound escape from a sea hag to the sinister reveal of the truth behind Patricia’s community gathering hinted at in glimpses of possessed people in the background. Each little story unfolds as this perfect little microcosm of humour and horror in a pinpoint-sharp blend that pays homage to the classics while tweaking the format just enough to make every episode feel utterly unique.

Widow’s Bay is one of my favourite things on TV right now, and a gloriously fun answer to the lack of monster-of-the-week shows that has its cake and eats it too with serialized storytelling and excellent single-episode scaries. Are you keeping up with it so far? What do you think of the season as it stands? Did you know my beloved Chris Fleming is going to be in it, too? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via Mac Daily