Widow's Bay just wrapped its first season on Apple TV, and by most measures it landed.
The series, created by Katie Dippold, has already been renewed for a second season. It follows Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, the mayor of a Martha's Vineyard-like island community called Widow's Bay, who lives with his teenage son Evan and manages an eccentric town staff. As tourists arrive, supernatural forces begin to take over, bringing ghostly clowns, predatory sea hags, and a masked killer to the island.
According to Rolling Stone, director Hiro Murai executive produced the season and directed five of its 10 episodes. He describes the show as sitting at a specific, hard-to-define intersection of genres.
"There wasn't an exact comp," Murai said. "We wanted to make a workplace comedy with a classic sitcom structure, but give it real stakes, and then ramp that up into a horror space. We really swung for the fences. We wanted it to feel unique and like something you haven't seen before. All of it was a precarious dance. We made choices that might not have worked, but it feels like we got to a place where people would buy it dramatically but we could also push it."
Each episode was designed to work on its own while also building toward larger lore, a structure Murai said was a conscious pushback against how television has been made in recent years. "For the last couple years especially, TV has been really obsessed with the notion of a season as a 10-hour movie," he said. "We liked the idea of harkening back to an older version of TV where an episode of television can be self-contained. There's something nostalgic about it, too. I grew up watching and loving The X-Files, and you could enjoy that show for its overarching canon or you could just drop into an episode. There's something really charming and refreshing about that."
Murai did not direct every episode himself. He brought in other directors to handle individual chapters based on whether they leaned harder into horror or comedy. Horror filmmaker Ti West, known for MaXXXine, directed the flashback episode about the island's history. Andrew DeYoung, whose credits include Friendship and The Chair Company, directed a comedic episode in which Tom accidentally takes psychedelic mushrooms.
The cast includes Kate O'Flynn, Dale Dickey, Jeff Hiller, K Callan, Kingston Rumi Southwick, and Stephen Root.
Season two of Widow's Bay has been greenlit, though no premiere date has been announced.
