Widow’s Bay: Matthew Rhys’ new Apple show homages—and spoofs—Stephen King.

Horror and comedy have gone hand in hand since long before Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein. They’re the most technically demanding genres, where a laugh or a scare can hinge on a difference in timing or tone, and both function as release valves for truths that are too painful to look at directly. Some of the best horror movies make us laugh at our own fear; some of the best comedies take us right to the edge of the abyss. Either way, we scream.

The setup for Widow’s Bay, the new Apple TV series created by Katie Dippold, is pure Stephen King: A small island off the coast of New England is haunted by an ancient evil that prevents those born there from ever leaving. But to the town’s beleaguered mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), that centuries-old curse is more of a persistent nuisance. Tom’s big dream isn’t vanquishing whatever it is his town’s more superstitious longtime residents think lurks in the shadows; it’s turning Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard, a picturesque former whaling settlement where tourists flock for a taste of rustic charm.

The easier route would be leaning into Widow’s Bay’s dark past, drawing guests who might be fascinated with the fact that a sleepy offshore hamlet of a few thousand at most boasts at least two serial killers in its recent history: a masked slasher called the Boogeyman and another known as “the clown killer of ’51.” (There’s some confusion about whether that means the latter killed clowns or dressed as one.) But marketing to the Salem crowd would mean admitting what Widow’s Bay is, delving into the town’s past rather than turning away from it. Tom’s not immune to local lore, which is why his teenage son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), has never set foot off the island—doing so, as everyone knows but no one seems to talk about, leads to a sudden and inexplicable death. But he’s still determined to lure travelers to his doomed little town, because the only way he can atone for condemning his child to a life apart from the larger world is to bring that world to the island instead.

Dippold, who wrote The Heat and spent four years on Parks and Recreation, is an old hand at comedy, but while she’s technically experienced at mixing it with horror, her forays into the genre, the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters and the 2023 remake of The Haunted Mansion, tilt heavily toward the comedic. (This is also true of perhaps her greatest contribution to the culture, her famous tweet about dressing up as the Babadook.) Widow’s Bay tries to find a more even balance. It’s not, for many of the first season’s 10 episodes, really clear what terrible things have happened in the town’s fog-shrouded history—even by the end, we’re still just getting hints. But the wild-eyed frenzy with which Stephen Root’s island old-timer, Wyck, speaks of it is enough to convince us that it was really, really bad. Others, like Tom’s second-in-command, Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), have more personal reasons to fear. An officious spinster who also runs the community’s rickety bookmobile, she narrowly escaped the Boogeyman as a teenager (or at least she says she did) and has been on edge ever since.

The setup is perfect for a genre-hopping monster-of-the-week show located somewhere at the intersection of It and The X-Files. The season’s best episodes are also the most self-contained, not just in terms of plot but tone. In the second, “Lodging,” one of several helmed by “This Is America” and Atlanta director Hiro Murai, Tom spends the night in the town’s inn, determined to dispel rumors that it’s plagued by any number of restless spirits, including one called “the ungrateful Hortense.” His determined rationalism starts to crumble as he peruses the stack of creepy board games in the lounge, one of which, called Teeth, consists only of a box containing a set of pliers. The fourth, “Beach Reads,” focuses on Patricia, whose attempt to throw a townwide party seems doomed to failure until she starts taking the advice of a mysterious self-help manual. Flynn starts out playing the character as a nasal, grating caricature, as if she wakes up every morning and douses herself in friendship repellent. But the episode-long spotlight gives her a chance to play the hurt beneath Patricia’s prickliness and make her more than a small-town busybody.

Patricia isn’t the only Widow’s Bay resident to have her off-putting side. Although the town’s business owners wouldn’t mind a few more paying customers, few of them really seem to want mainlanders around, or act pleased when a travel writer’s glowing write-up—somewhat sweatily managed by Tom—starts to attract the first substantial crop of tourists they’ve seen in memory. The police chief, Bechir (Kevin Carroll), asks Tom why he’s the mayor “if you hate everyone in this town so much,” but the show doesn’t give us much reason to doubt Tom’s assessment, unless you count the fact that he thinks of himself as the story’s good guy.

Although it’s clearly riffing on Stephen King’s love of sleepy Maine hamlets, Widow’s Bay is strangely nonspecific about exactly which part of the New England coast it’s meant to be near (were they worried Massachusetts would sue for defamation?), which costs it a chunk of the specificity it would need to bring its imaginary town to life. Maybe Dippold got her fill of local color on Parks and Rec, but its absence is felt here, particularly over the long haul.

The failure to flesh out the population of Widow’s Bay beyond a handful of characters doesn’t just undermine its sense of place. It deprives the show of something every good horror story needs: victims. Although the season grows eerier as Tom discovers more of the island’s dreadful backstory, it’s rare that anything terrible happens to anyone we truly care about, and the longer the ominous early setups, like a worn chair with leather arm restraints stationed menacingly in an underground room, fail to pay off, the less likely it seems they ever will. It’s as if Lost showed us the hatch in the pilot and forgot to return to it, or it opened up just to reveal another hatch. Streaming shows rely on slowly unraveling mysteries to keep viewers binging, but horror rests in the fear of the unknown, which puts the forces driving Widow’s Bay forward at cross purposes. That’s probably why so many of the most long-running horror shows are anthologies, and those that aren’t, like Stranger Things, have to keep switching up the nature of their central threat so we don’t get too comfortable with it.

Jokes and spooky stories can both be elastic, stretched out as long as the teller’s breath lasts and the campfire stays lit. But that elongation only pays off when you’ve got a conclusion that was worth the wait: and hanging from that door handle … was a hook! Widow’s Bay spins a good yarn, but I’m not sure that payoff is coming, and the embers are burning low.