The new Apple TV horror comedy Widow's Bay asks an important question: "What if the mayor from Jaws insisted on keeping the beaches open, not in spite of shark attacks, but in spite of the fact that his island is suffering from a centuries-old curse?"
Matthew Rhys plays Tom, mayor of the titular community. Situated 42 nautical miles off the coast of New England, Widow's Bay has its mild quirks: cell phones don't work, nor does most modern technology, so everyone uses landlines, answering machines, and analog TV sets. But it also has its menacing ones: people born on the island believe they can never leave, and there are various local legends involving serial killers, ghosts, sea monsters, and cannibalism. When a New York Times travel writer asks Tom about the latter while touring the island's historical museum, Tom insists that's not true — while the writer is standing next to a framed newspaper article about cannibalism.
There's a lot of that going on here, in a show created by Katie Dippold, a Parks and Recreation alum who's written movie comedies like The Heat. The travel writer's arrival is the culmination of Tom's attempt to turn Widow's Bay into a tourist mecca like Martha's Vineyard, even as old-timers like Wyck (Stephen Root) insist that this would be endangering anyone who came to visit. Tom, a widower whose teenage son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) resents never getting to see the mainland, spends the show's early episodes in willful denial about the various dangers, even as evidence mounts that the world — and maybe even the locals — might be better off if the ocean swallowed the place whole.