Isle Be Damned

My guess is that Chuck has strict instructions not to interrupt the “Barbers’ Picnic”.



Also, Barbers’ Picnic is my new band name and probably one of the activities in the parlor cabinet in the hotel on Widow’s Bay.

Did you think I’d segue from Peanuts’ currently syndicated repeats into talk of The Pitt instead?



I did consider using the announcement of this year’s Emmy nominations as a springboard to discuss TV more broadly since I haven’t done so in far too long. As frustrating as that’s been, I’m especially upset at having failed to recommend Apple’s delightful Bay, created by Katie Dippold, while it ran.

The show’s almost surreptitiously versatile cast is led by Matthew Rhys as Tom
Loftis, mayor of a small island community in New England; Stephen Root as grizzled sailor Wyck Crawford; and breakout Kate O’Flynn as Patricia Moyer, chief assistant to the mayor and disastrous social director. All carry past trauma born of the sins of Widow’s Bay’s founding. Tom is willfully skeptical when it comes to any occult danger and has aspirations of greatly boosting tourism despite the warnings by Wyck, a tortured believer in its haunting lore, that he’ll simply be luring more people to their deaths as the latest round of malevolence approaches.

Largely episodic but with a definite build over ten chapters in which its mythology is meted out, Widow’s Bay lent itself to commentary and speculation on weekly recaps such as those in Alan Sepinwall’s blog cum newsletter, which I plugged here when he relaunched it independently on the Ghost platform last year, and its attendant Discord server, which I finally joined after learning how to adjust or do away with various gewgaws that assault the senses.



I quite enjoyed chatting The Pitt there as well, having wrapped a slow binge of the
first season on HBO Max just as the second began, and likewise digging into the FX-on-Hulu-on-FX series The Lowdown. No TV, inclusive of streaming, has engrossed me like Bay since Apple’s recent, utterly brilliant Vince Gilligan show Pluribus, however. I’m really sorry that I didn’t shout it out with a brief post when it debuted and I’ve considered adapting my contributions into a thorough dive either soon enough before memory fades or, more likely given the way things are going, in advance of the next season along with a potential rewatch if the blog’s still around.



Widow’s Bay is as much comedy as drama, or vice versa, officially the former per
the Emmys. I’d say the humor is at the forefront on par with the more overtly comedic scenes and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural over their runs, with the level of jump scares and gore a bit higher. Dippold wrote and produced on Parks and Recreation, so of course somebody has crafted a perfect Widow’s Bay version of the opening credits of that show easily worth a minute of your time if you’ve seen both.

The laughs come via offhand references to profound weirdness in the island’s history and the excavation of that history as the consequences of a seemingly literal deal with the devil made centuries ago by its founder mark their periodic return. Bay has echoes of Jaws and Stephen King and slasher-film Final Girl shenanigans that, speaking as someone who mostly stays away from the more intense depths of the horror genre, I don’t think viewers need be deeply familiar with to appreciate. We get a delightful guest turn from Betty Gilpin as a young Puritan wife and a social event that suddenly goes Yellowjackets and Hamish Linklater as what I can only describe as the amalgamation of Alan Moore and Solomon Grundy.

Rhys, O’Flynn, Root, the great Dale Dickey, Gilpin, and Linklater were all nominated for acting Emmys, in addition to the Outstanding Comedy Series nod. A dozen further nominees include executive producers Dippold and Hiro Murai for, respectively, writing and directing the pilot.



Alan Sepinwall’s forums being where the bulk of my Widow’s Bay talk occurred, much as Nikki Stafford’s blog was for that of an earlier island obsession, let me end on a plug for his and fellow TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk’s new, hour-long podcast. Their convo on its first nine of ten episodes leads into musings about yet another possibly, but obviously definitely, cursed outpost that became home to seven castaways on a fateful trip, one that started from a tropic port aboard a tiny ship.