Widow’s Bay Season 1

★★★★☆

I’d heard good things about the horror-comedy Widow’s Bay, about a cursed New England island town whose new mayor insists on making it a tourist destination. What could go wrong? The season as a whole was hit and miss. But there were some really good hits.

The episode with the creepy book and Patricia’s horrific party disaster, the flashback to the founding generation of the town (with Betty Gilpin!), and the season finale were all excellent. And the finale wrapped up just enough of the story to feel like a satisfying conclusion, while still leaving some of the mysteries unexplained. (And hinting at new ones, such as just how many people were involved in placating the curse in the mid-20th century, and why was that institutional knowledge lost?)

Other episodes had a lot of trouble with pacing. But the main problem was that I just didn’t find the main character interesting. Patricia? Yep. Wyck? Stole every scene he was in. (That Emmy was well-deserved!) Mayor Tom Loftis? Just annoying enough to be…well…annoying, while still being plain enough to be the straight man to the jokes. The two episodes I liked best in the middle of the season were the two he didn’t appear in.

Then I watched the season finale. On top of everything else going on, as he agonized over what he thought he had to do, it became clear that the actor just hadn’t pulled out all the stops until the character finally, really accepted that yes, the town and island are cursed, and yes, he’s responsible for dealing with that, and the price might be too high for him to pay…or to live with himself after paying it.