The parallels between Widow’s Bay and the work of Stephen King are clear from the get-go, but they feel the most palpable when the mayor of the eponymous island town, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), runs into the ghost of a literal murderous clown in its second episode. It’s appropriately harrowing — Tom is confronted by the specter in the crawl space of an obviously haunted hotel — but the Apple TV series wastes no time turning that into the setup for the perfect joke. You see, Tom seems to be the only resident of Widow’s Bay who doesn’t believe in the myriad superstitions entwined in the town’s century-old lore. He’s only at said hotel to debunk the laundry list of phantoms associated with it, but the morning after his stay, the Bay’s kookiest salty dog, Wyck (Stephen Root), only has to take one look at him to say, “The clown — that’s what got you, huh?”
It’s Root’s deadpan delivery, and his dogged commitment as Wyck, that takes Widow’s Bay from horror pastiche into surprisingly smart comedy. A handful of critics have already compared the series to a darker, drier Parks and Recreation — and given that its creator, Katie Dippold, used an early version of this story to land a spot in Parks and Rec’s writers room, that comparison feels perfectly apt.
