Widow’s Bay, a new Apple TV+ show set in a quaint island town in New England, opens Wednesday with its first two episodes and sends a new mayor straight into a place that looks cozy until it starts showing its teeth. Tom Loftis, played by Matthew Rhys, arrives in a town where working-class locals and families that go back several generations live under a centuries-old curse that seems built to keep the place frightening.
The early pitch for the series is Parks & Recreation meets Stephen King, and that mix is easy to see in the people around Loftis. Patricia, a mousy and socially awkward deputy played by Kate O’Flynn, is part of a cast that also includes Dale Dickey as a flinty veteran, Jeff Hiller as a bewildered clerk and Stephen Root as an old salty dog. Katie Dippold and her collaborators take the raw materials of Stephen King’s bestsellers and run with them, turning the town’s polite civic routines into a setup for horror.
That horror is not shy. A haunted inn riffs on The Shining and It, a legendary sea hag sets her sights on Loftis, and a vintage book on how to throw a party turns out to have a second agenda once you read between the lines. A reanimated corpse shows up, slasher flicks get the remix treatment, and the show leans into the town’s checkered past without pretending it is just atmosphere. In the 1800s, Widow’s Bay had a cannibalism-in-the-church incident, which helps explain why the place is treated as more than a scenic backdrop.
That history matters because the town’s historical center is dedicated to preserving the Widow’s Bay legacy, even as the series uses the setting to push a workplace comedy into something nastier and more unstable. The joke is not that the town is haunted. It is that everyone there has learned to live with the haunting as if it were another local institution. With the first two episodes arriving Wednesday, the series opens by making clear that the curse is not buried in the past. It is running the place.