A lot of writers have it: the project in the drawer that they keep returning to, working on, over the course of many years. Maybe it’s a book. Usually, it’s a book.
For Katie Dippold, it was “Widow’s Bay.”
Dippold, who created, showruns and executive produces the new Apple TV series, has been thinking about “Widow’s Bay” for nearly 20 years, during which time she’s largely been writing comedies like “The Heat,” “Spy” and “Ghostbusters.”
“The inspiration was really a feeling,” Dippold told TheWrap, recalling the sensation she got growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s whenever she and her friends would walk past the local, supposedly haunted house.
“I would be so giddy going out on a summer night because I knew I was going to be scared, but we would also laugh and it was very communal. That’s been something I’ve wanted to capture my whole life,” the writer said. She took a crack at the series for the first time 18 years ago, and it was the original version of the “Widow’s Bay” pilot that landed her a job in 2009 as a staff writer on the Mike Schur-created NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”
“I think it gave Mike an idea of my sense of humor,” Dippold revealed. “But [that script] is very different. It was very joke-focused, and it was something I just kept revisiting because I don’t know that I would have watched that version of the show. It felt like a parody, and I wanted Widow’s Bay to feel like a very real place in a real world. A place I would want to go to, even if I would die immediately.”
“As a horror fan, I want the tension and the stakes to be taken seriously,” Dippold explained. “I just kept digging away at it, and then a couple years ago, finally got serious and started polishing it and took it back out.”
The general public gets the chance to see the result of Dippold’s 18 years of polishing this week. The first two episodes of “Widow’s Bay” premiere Wednesday on Apple TV, and Dippold says the finished series shares much in common with her original draft. Both versions are set on a fictional New England island town that is supposedly haunted, and her initial draft even featured many of the same characters as the final series, including Matthew Rhys’ stubborn Mayor Tom Loftis and Kate O’Flynn’s socially anxious Patricia.
But the “Widow’s Bay” that begins streaming on Apple this week is darker, scarier and more grounded than the version that got her a job on “Parks and Recreation.” Full of colorful characters, the story follows Loftis as he attempts to make his town a tourist destination on par with Martha’s Vineyard, but battles the fact that the superstitions, strange disappearances and unexplained deaths that have plagued the town for centuries may actually be the result of a real, bona fide curse.
Over the course of its 10-episode first season, the show does not just pay homage to horror movies like “Jaws,” “The Fog” and “Halloween,” but it emerges as its own, distinct horror experience, one that is as scary as it is funny. Rarely has a horror comedy like “Widow’s Bay” been attempted on television, let alone pulled off, and that is what drew acclaimed director and executive producer Hiro Murai to it.
“The script was clearly doing something so ambitious,” Murai told TheWrap. “It was straddling tones in a way that’s really difficult to do, and there wasn’t really a tonal reference we could point to and be like, ‘Oh, this is what we want the show to feel like.’ But the ambition was so exciting and, after Katie and I talked, I was just like, ‘This feels worth experimenting and reaching for, even if you fall short.’”
One of TV’s most accomplished directors, it was Murai’s past, awards-winning work on shows like “Atlanta,” “Station Eleven” and “Barry” that made him Dippold’s “dream director” for “Widow’s Bay.” Behind the camera, he found himself wanting to lean into the grounded nature of Dippold’s final script.
“The whole premise of the show is it’s about very ordinary people who wouldn’t be the heroes of these horror movies having to deal with extraordinary horror things. In a way, our baseline visual language for the show became, ‘What if this was real?’” Murai explained. “Obviously, there are moments where we’re milking tension and having fun and leaning into the genre of it, but our base language is sort of plain-spoken. I think what that does, hopefully, is when the genre piece shows up or something surreal or absurd happens, it hits you like a shock.”
Murai was not the only artist drawn to the ambition of “Widow’s Bay.” When asked what it was about Dippold’s pitch for the series that appealed to him, Rhys, who leads “Widow’s Bay” as its tenacious, outsider mayor, told TheWrap all it took was reading her script for the show’s first episode.
“Katie’s pitch was quite simply Episode One. I read it and I went, ‘I want to do this. Please. Let me talk to Katie Dippold so I can try and persuade her.’ There was no need for any pitch,” Rhys explained. “When I knew Hiro was going to direct, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, yes.’ So it was more me trying to pitch to them that I could do it and wanted to. That was the hard pitch I gave them: Desperation. [Laughs]”
It is in Rhys’ Tom, a mayor who was elected without contest, that the parallels between “Widow’s Bay” and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” are clearest. A bureaucrat who is hell bent on bringing tourist attention to the island town he calls home, despite the impassioned warnings of superstitious townsfolk like old sailor Wyck Crawford (“Barry” star Stephen Root), Rhys’ Tom is a man who is sometimes willing to put the “best interests” of “Widow’s Bay” over the safety of both its citizens and visitors.
Tom is not cowardly, though, nor is he selfish. He is a man who, as the first two episodes of “Widow’s Bay” prove, is willing to put his own body and reputation on the line to either prove his point or protect others. As a result, there is not just Murray Hamilton’s oft-mocked Mayor Vaughn from “Jaws” in Tom, but also Roy Scheider’s reluctantly heroic, protective Chief Brody. Rhys, for his part, even sees a little of “Jaws’” third hero, Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, in his “Widow’s Bay” lead.
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“I think there are times — maybe not Quint [Robert Shaw] for Tom — when all three characters [O’Flynn’s Patricia, Rhys’ Tom and Root’s Wyck] have various elements of Quint, Brody and Hooper. They all have different wants and needs,” Rhys told TheWrap. “I know they say Tom is cowardly. I never saw him as cowardly. I think he’s obstructive because he wants to stay tunnel-visioned. He’s just desperately trying to get this thing over the line and bring the people in. There are elements of all three characters from ‘Jaws’ that I could relate to.”
Over the course of the opening episodes of “Widow’s Bay,” Tom meets his fiercest resistance not from the supposed ghosts of the show’s eponymous island, but from Root’s Wyck, who sounds the town’s decades-old alarm in the pilot episode because he believes Widow’s Bay has “woken up” again.
“He’s a protector,” Root said of his character. “He really feels that he wants to protect this island, and there’s this interloper coming in and doing bad things, like bringing people here! As much as Tom is doing what he can to help the community, I’m doing just as much to keep them away. I love the conflict.”
Like Rhys’ Tom, fans will discover over the course of the coming weeks that the secrets of “Widow’s Bay” are diverse and many. The series has fun with that, turning each of its 10 opening installments into semi-standalone adventures that lean into different horror subgenres. Viewers get their first taste of that pattern in “Widow’s Bay” Episode 2, which is set in a supposedly haunted inn and allows the Apple TV series to become “The Shining” for 40 minutes.
This shift marks a divergence from the John Carpenter-influenced, “Fog”-esque events of the “Widow’s Bay” premiere and reveals the show’s propensity to reinvent itself every week. That is a creative approach that Dippold stumbled onto during the writing of “Widow’s Bay” Season 1, and she is glad she did.
“Going into the writer’s room, I knew how I wanted the season to end,” Dippold recalled. “I knew the arcs, and I had some idea of the kind of things I wanted to happen, and then those [standalone adventures] just started happening.”
“I really love the idea that, even though it’s serialized and it should all feel of one piece, that you could just say, ‘I want to watch the episode with the spooky inn,’ and it could feel special on its own,” the creator explained. “That was a real goal for me.”
New episodes of “Widow’s Bay” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
