While I assume most of you will be doing your civic duty this weekend and seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters, perhaps a few of you will be stuck at home with a sick child or a needy dog or something and will want to watch a little TV. To that end, here are some thoughts on two new shows premiering this week. 

Widow’s Bay, AppleTV+

Katie Dippold, who wrote the Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy film The Heat, worked on Parks and Recreation, and famously dressed up as the Babadook, takes a swerve into horror for this quirky mix of frights and funniness. Set on a New England island that seems to be cursed, Widow’s Bay is a weird tonal blend that works more often than it doesn’t. 

Matthew Rhys plays Tom, the mayor of the titular town (which is also the name of the island, so he is the mayor of a whole island, much like Mayor McCheese is mayor of the whole world of McDonaldland), which he thinks is in dire need of tourist dollars. The likes of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard get all the glory while Widow’s Bay is just saddled with creepy lore about cannibal settlers and a string of slasher movie-style murders. Tom is not native to the island, he just spent summers there as a kid, which puts him in opposition to the locals, who are far more superstitious and never leave the island for fear that it will kill them. 

Pretty early in the pilot episode, it becomes clear that something is stirring, a malevolent force that intends very bad things for all the island’s inhabitants, including Kate O’Flynn’s lonely government administrator, Stephen Root’s crackpot doomsayer, and Kevin Carroll as the town sheriff. Dale Dickey, K Callan, and Jeff Hiller also pop up on occasion, giving the series lively, offbeat character. I suppose you could say it’s like Northern Exposure if that show had scary things in it, but I don’t want to make Widow’s Bay sound too quirky.  

It’s surprisingly good on the horror stuff, director Hiro Murai (among others like Ti West and Andrew DeYoung) creating plenty of eerie atmosphere to offset Dippold’s more comedic sensibilities. That balance makes for a pretty compelling series, one that defies categorization and thus feels like something refreshingly new. Plus it was actually filmed in New England!