In “Widow’s Bay,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV, Matthew Rhys plays Tom Loftis, the mayor of a town on an island 40 miles off the coast of New England. At first, we don’t quite know when we are — the TV sets are cathode ray, the phones are landlines and a cigarette machine sits in the town bar. Wi-Fi and the web are mere rumors. Is it quaint? Or is it creepy?
We are, in fact, in the present day. Though Tom has lived in Widow’s Bay since the birth of his (now teenage) son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), and spent summers there growing up, he can come across as both new to town and new to the job. Apart from Rev. Bryce (Toby Huss, always glad to see you), he seems to have few friends — he knows people, obviously, but many mock him, for no clear reasons, as cowardly and soft. (He was elected mayor only because he ran unopposed.) His big idea is to make the island a tourist destination, and to that end, he has convinced a New York Times travel writer to visit; much goes wrong, but an article is written, and the tourists come.
The human-headed fly in the ointment is the island itself, which is a supernatural smorgasbord, mostly quiet but waking up just in time to meet the visitors. (How can the church bell ring when the bells are chained up?) In between spasms of evil, the implication is, it’s an OK place to live, if you ignore the feckless teenagers, the middle-aged mean girls and the overfed barflies. (Exactly what people do there for a living, including whatever Tom worked at before he became mayor, is unstated.)
And though the local history museum is nothing but artifacts of atrocities (old newspaper report of cannibalism, a murderer’s mask), only Wyck (Stephen Root, great as always) sees anything paranormal in it, and he’s generally written off as a drunk. (Paradoxically, many do subscribe to the notion that leaving the island is a ticket to a quick death; even Tom won’t hedge that bet when it comes to Evan.) One thinks of the citizens of Buffy’s Sunnydale, blithely going about their business, not moving away despite being located on a Hellmouth. Or the people of Los Angeles, not thinking about earthquakes.
With its New England island setting, a mayor trying to boost the holiday economy, and something nasty in the water (and elsewhere), the series does at times suggest “Jaws” but with spooks, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that at some point in its genesis, those words were spoken. But horror stories have been around forever — and never in such profusion as they are now, to the point that there is little new under the bloody sun. “Widow’s Bay” reaches deep into that bag of tropes, but it’s all part of the game; familiarity breeds anticipation, which breeds fear.
You get a “Halloween”-style slasher (or whichever masked madman you prefer); a sea hag; a scary clown, for half a second; a demon fog (as in John Carpenter’s “The Fog”) and a haunted hotel, with specific references to “The Shining” (a board game at the inn is called “Daddy’s Home,” from a line in the movie; sounds of a New Year’s Eve celebration come through a grate in the bathroom). Plus sundry hallucinations, bad dreams, possession, dark spaces, creepy noises, fraught family relations — and, as with so many horror stories, a bad thing in the past bringing down the future. (This bit of history gets its own episode, which, despite some powerhouse secret special guest stars, might have been handled in a speech.) It’s a bit of an anthology, week to week, running over a long arc in which Wyck, Tom and his assistant Patricia (the excellent Kate O’Flynn) — another mocked and friendliness person, whose worth will show through — become allies in a fight against the evil most of their neighbors somehow fail to notice.
The series was created by Katie Dippold, whose credits include the female-led “Ghostbusters,” “Haunted Mansion” and “Parks and Recreation”; its city governance theme is mirrored here, through a glass darkly). Hiro Murai directed half the series’ 10 episodes, working again with Christian Sprenger, his director of photography on “Atlanta” and “Station Eleven,” which I regard as a seal of quality. Apple TV describes the series as a horror comedy, but there’s really not much comedy in it — what exists is mostly assigned to eccentric City Hall characters (K Callan as a befuddled secretary, Dale Dickey as an acerbic chain smoker in charge of records, which is to say, she knows things) and the air of frantic, not quite farcical desperation that attaches to Tom throughout the story. (There’s a little slapstick as well.) But many of its characters are exaggerated in a way that can pass for comical, until the horror just elbows them out of the way in its very effective, storm-tossed final acts.
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