Pop Culture Happy Hour - Widow’s Bay

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Widow’s Bay is a spine-tingling blend of horror and comedy you won't want to miss. The buzzy Apple TV series follows a mayor (Matthew Rhys) who is desperately trying to bring tourism to a small island town that might be cursed. The cast includes Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, and Betty Gilpin.If you’re looking for other eerie island escapes, check out these episodes A bratty boss gets a dose of his own medicine in ‘Send Help’‘Lord of the Flies’ gets the Netflix treatmentConnect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport Pop Culture Happy Hour+See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

A mayor of a small island town might deal with a lot. Infrastructure, finances, superstitions about local curses, and, of course, actual local curses. You might have heard people talking about the new Apple TV series Widows Bay. It's funny and creepy and follows just such a mayor as he desperately tries to protect the reputation of his town. And he sticks with it, even as the evidence mounts that the island is in fact in the grip of something supernaturally dangerous. I'm Glenn Weldon. And I'm Linda Holmes. Today we're talking about Widows Bay on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining us is NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben. Welcome back, Danielle. I am so happy to be on this episode. Thank you so much. And we are, of course, so happy to have you. Widows Bay focuses on Mayor Tom Loftus, played by Matthew Reese. Tom confronts the fact that his job as mayor comes with some very special challenges, from an ominous fog to an inn that the locals are afraid to stay in over

night, which causes some difficulties with tourism. And tourism is Tom's great dream for Widows Bay, especially when he persuades a New York Times travel writer to visit. Local residents include Patricia, who works for Tom. She's played by Kate O'Flynn. There's also Wick, played by the great Stephen Root. Wick is a fisherman who is certain. There is a curse on the island. It's a haunt. I didn't realize it was a haunt. I'm sorry. I'm Could you remind me again, a haunt is worse than a spook, but not as bad as a fright? Oh, equal to a scare, right? You can mock me all you like.

The islands cursed Tom. There's a lot going on in these ten episodes, so let's get into it. Glenn, I'm going to start with you. I think you were the first person that I knew who was watching and enjoying this show. How'd you like it? I really did. I know I loved it from the jump. I mean, you can't cast Matthew Reese and Stephen Root and Dale Dickey.

and Jeff Hiller, who has a small part. They don't do enough with him, but he's got a small part. You can't cast those folks and not be Glenn Kattnip. Then later, you're going to throw in Betty Gilpin, and then Hamish Linklater, who also plays Richard Warren, the guy who created the town. The founder of the town. You're not playing fair.

That is ridiculous. But then something happens in episode seven where we get the perfect joke, the best joke ever, the platonic ideal of jokes. That's when Tom enters a room where Wick and Patricia have been questioning the corpse, the zombie or whatever of. Richard Warren. Tom picks up what we know to be Patricia's notepad, the Cato Flynn character. He flips a page and we read, Hello, I am Patricia. But that's not the joke. That's the setup.

The perfect joke, the best joke happens next. He flips a page and we read, are you mad at something I said, question mark? Now, that is so perfect because it grows so organically, intrinsically, inevitably from these specific characters in this very specific. And let's stipulate, you know, wacky situation. Richard Warren, we've met him before in a flashback. We know kind of a grumpy Gus, right? Even back when he had a pulse, he was kind of a grumpy Gus. And so he's been a few centuries trapped in a coffin.

And you'd expect him to be a bit prickly. But we the viewers haven't seen him in dead guy form yet. That's important. It's a part of this joke. We are active in this process because we're gaining information from this notepad about this interaction that we haven't seen. But then Patricia, who is the character find of 2026. the best thing about this show, such an amazing creation.

She told you from the first moment we met her that she's not going to be just a stock character, that she's somebody very specific, somebody real, somebody worth spending some time with. She's so easily wounded and she's seething with just everything. We have seen her enough to know how she navigates the world. And are you mad at something I said?

We just think, yeah, that's where she would go. It works because it's so wildly, incongruous, but at the same time, because of the work they've been doing to set up the characterization, the writing, the performance, that feels inevitable. And when we arrive at it, we are surprised that that's where she would go, but then we're not. And that's why it's the perfect joke. And that's why I love this show because the show is filled with stuff like that. All right. So you do, I am getting from your reaction like the show. Love the show. Very good, very good. Danielle, how about you? How'd you like Widows Bay? I absolutely loved it. It's one of my favorite things I've seen in a while on TV. except there is an asterisk here. And we're not going to go into detail, but the season finale left me kind of cold. It didn't stick the landing for me. That is all I'm going to say. Because the rest of the season is so good that I still, you know, unqualifiably would say, yes, go out and watch this.

It's fantastic. For various reasons that Glenn got into, first of all, the show is just a festival of actors where you're like, that guy. I love that guy. I mean, Hamish Linklater is one of my people where I just think put him. in everything. If you haven't seen him in Midnight Mass, by the way, go watch that series. He's wonderful. Speaking of creepy people, yes. But there's also, yeah, Chris Fleming, Betty Gilpin, all the people you listed. So it's delightful. Matthew Reese, who of course I loved in the Americans, I was delighted to see, like he's not a chameleon actor like Daniel Day Lewis, where he disappears

into a part, but his energy in this is so different from the guy you saw in the American. kids. There's an episode where he does mushrooms. His absolutely terrified, baffled, he's almost reduced to being a toddler effect in that episode is so funny. It's perfection. I think maybe the best thing I can say about the show is the perfect blend of funny and scary. The first couple episodes, I thought of 30 Rock. Like there is a joke density there, especially when the New York Times travel writer is being walked through the little town museum. The tour guy, Jerry, walked past a blood-spattered dress

and in her very nice little old lady voice goes, I was just about to show Arthur the witch trial. Yeah, great source of pride. We caught him. We burned them. You know what, Jerry, I'm going to take it from here. We got it. We burned them.

I love that, too. I was dying. Yeah. It's wonderful. It's so funny. The scary stuff, it's not. ruin your night scary, but like there's a sea hag, there's a clown. They both freaked me out. This is something I haven't seen before on TV. I was delighted the whole time. Yeah. It's funny that

you mention sort of Matthew Reese in a different form because I first saw Matthew Reese on the ABC broadcast family drama, brothers and sisters, which was your basic sort of like family drama. And so I had originally seen Matthew Reese in this more kind of like sweet guy kind of way. And so to me, it was somewhat surprising when he then became the Americans and that super intense stuff. So to me, this is sort of coming back to a bit of a looseness and an informality in his personality, a silliness that I remember from when I first saw him in that show and thought he was very charming. You know, I don't think this is quite my catnip as much as it is, say, Glenn's. But I do think I enjoyed it a lot. It is very funny.

You know, you mentioned Danielle, that museum tour. I also zeroed in on that line about the witches because that is a great line, right? It is so common now when people talk about burning witches. It is seen as a great sign of shame and all of that. And the fact that she's just so proud of it, you know, we caught them, we burned them, is very funny. And of course, the creator, Katie Dippold, is a very funny writer. She came out of Parks and Recreation and the Heat and some other things I really like. And it's funny because there is a lot of Parks and Rec in this show, in the DNA of this show.

Yeah. The kind of bureaucracy of local government and the effort to kind of keep a town running when everyone is mad at you all the time is very parks and wreck. With this really strange overlay of horror and curses and all that stuff. And eventually, you know, we mentioned Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater, who show up in a kind of a flashback episode going back a very long time in history to kind of get at how this whole curse started and how the founder of the town was involved and everything. I enjoyed that a great deal. And one of the things I like about it is that it is a very serialized show that has episodes that are still constructed as episodes. Like there is that flashback episode. There is an episode where Tom, the mayor, goes and stays overnight at the inn.

There is a wonderful episode where Patricia is kind of menaced by this boogeyman that they have in town. And she's wonderful in that episode. And it is kind of set apart. You know, they never completely disconnect from that serialized narrative, but they construct the individual episodes as episodes, which is something that I think when you can do it well, it has benefited a lot of shows from, you know, the bear has benefited from that, this show benefits from that. When you can take an episode and be like, this is part of a serialized narrative, but it has its own structure. I think that works really well.

But again, you know, I think the cast packed with ringers is in a lot of ways the secret weapon. You know, Stephen Root is doing everything here that you want to see Stephen Root do. You know, it's kind of an average of everything Stephen Root that's done in his life. You get a little Jimmy James, you get a little, you know, office space. You get a little, a little of this, little of that, little all over the place. Definitely a little of the guy he recently played in the movie on Hulu, Mike and Nick, and Nick and Alice. So all the MVP's, Betty Gilpin keeps popping up in things.

You know, she pops up in that J-Lo rom-com office romance that they have right now. She's kind of the assistant. She keeps popping up. It's always welcome. I love to see her. She elevates everything she's in and she elevates this as well. To me, it's a good show, solid bones, you know, but then just studded with this, like, you know, Dale Dickie is really there to do a big scene late in the series, a big and important scene,

and she just gets every single drop out of that scene. I want you to picture this. You're a little girl, and your finger gets broken off by a wagon wheel. Next thing you know, your dad's dead, and your stepmom is taking you on an adventure. I mean, you mentioned both the serialized nature of this and also all of these actors just batting a thousand. And I feel like those kind of combined to create another aspect of the show that I love, which is that this show never feels like it was phoned in. Like, this show feels very thoughtful for how funny it is. I think horror can be easy to dismiss as just a genre, you know.

But, like, they got Ty West to direct that episode. That's the flashback. Ty West, who directed Pearl, Maxine, those movies that Mia Gauth was in. I mean, they wanted horror and they did horror. And they did it, I think, remarkably well. And similarly, there are so many references in this series. There are references, I think, to loss. There's definitely Jaws.

I mean, you talk about Stephen Root. He's pretty much quint from time to time. And I don't mean that in a lazy way. They didn't rip anything off. He's doing his own thing. I think that's another thing I just liked about it. This feels like a show where the people writing it and making it were having so much fun and we're putting so much care into it. And I think that's another reason that this just really hit home with me.

Yeah. Well, we've got more to say about Widows Bay after this a little break. Welcome back. Glenn, what are you thinking about? The premise is very simple. It's what if the mayor from Jaws was our main character, basically. But instead of a shark, it was spooky stuff. And, you know, the way that Reese is playing him, you know, Reese can be kind of a goofball.

If you've ever seen him on The Wine Show, which is a reality series he did with Matthew Good, where they're just two bros hanging out, getting a little buzzed as they drink wines around the world. He's a goofball. And he brings to this character as he moves through this community a little air of annoyance and frustration. There's a little thread of Basil faulty to him. Not enough to make him like horrible, but it's just there. Now, when this series started, we've talked about the episodic nature. I liked it fine, but I was worried that it was sliding into a Monster of the Week format that felt formulaic.

You know, I felt like this show I love that was so weird was getting a kind of CW treatment. That's why I really responded. And I was surprised when I responded as much as I did when we widened out and got into the, sing along with me, the world building, the love. the backstory. For the first time I can remember in a long time, I didn't hate a flashback episode

because it brought such a different energy. It brought Betty Gilpin and Hamish Link later and all that stuff. And I was like, okay, now I'm into the zone. If it had maintained the Monster Week format, even though there were some really good episodes in it. I think I might not have responded

as strongly as they did, but I'm seeing a lot of people who say the exact opposite. That as soon as it widens out, it kind of loses them. Where'd you guys fall down on that? I think I responded to both. As I said,

I don't think I responded to either half of it quite as much as some people have. I mean, I know so many people who this is immediately their favorite show of the year. To me, it is a show I really like. I don't know that I responded to it, you know, all that differently, but I think had it stayed on the track that it was on at the beginning, I think as with many serialized shows, that was something that could only maintain for a certain period of time. And I do think in particular, you know, there's a little bit of ambiguity at the beginning about whether there's really a curse. And what I'm glad they didn't do is spend a lot of episodes being like, is there really a curse or is there not really a curse? They pretty quickly

establish, oh, there's a curse. And even though Tom starts off, I think very earnestly saying, I don't believe in curses. There's no such thing as curses. You know, people just have bad luck. And also, he can't bear to think that there could be a curse because he's so committed to building tourism in the local community. But I'm glad that they didn't sit very long in the Tom figures out there's a curse space because that I think would have gotten old quickly. The widening out worked for me. I hear you say that, Glenn, and it does make sense because the first, right, we start off with a couple of monsters of the week. I hadn't even thought of that.

But the widening out works, I think, because if I'm recalling correctly, the episode where it widens out, especially is episode four. which is an episode we spend almost entirely with Patricia. And it is a banger of an episode. And the thing is, it doesn't have the same energy as the first few. Like I said, it's not quite as laugh out loud funny the whole time. It's much more darkly funny. There's some yellow jackets in there. It's weird.

But it's delightfully weird. And like you said, who do you want to spend more time within the show than Patricia? Who works with the mayor in town hall? I think that that is perhaps why the widening out worked so well because the first time you really get to pull out and see more, you get to be with her. Her bookmobile, by the way, is called the paddy wagon. That is wonderful.

That is perfection. Just such a good touch. And when we learn in the second episode that they didn't print Patricia's poem and the guide to the town, we can see in Tom's face that he's the reason that they didn't print that poem. Never made a big thing. It's just a thing. Can we talk about who I wanted to spend a little less time with?

and this is my bugaboo with all of these shows. Oh, I know, you're going to say. The surly teen. Yep. The surly teen. Evan played by Kingston, Rumi Southwick. No fault of the actors. Fault of that character.

I realize how much of the shows... That's Tom's son. That's Tom's son. A, lot of the shows emotional heart resides with him. One of the reasons Tom is so worried is, A, he wants tourism, but B, he's really worried about his kid, and I get that. What happens to him? But if I never see another surly teen on my TV screen, I'll be happy.

And he just fits a trope. Yeah, I think that the show. show, and in fact, more and more as the show progresses, you learn that Tom's worry is centered on his son. And on some of the strange things about the town, one of which is that there's sort of a superstition that people who are born on the island can't leave. And his son was born on the island. So he worries, if he accepts that there's a curse, then he's accepting my son can never leave. And that really, you know, worries and concerns him. So he's stuck in this place of denying there to curse, but also sort of guarding against the possibility that there's a curse.

And I think his worry over his kid, that's where you get the most color to Tom that is separate from how he feels about being the mayor, right? Because otherwise, you really get just Tom as mayor, Tom as Leslie Knope of Widows Bay. And because he has this son and he's widowed, you get a different kind of sense of what the stakes for him are. Because originally you kind of think the stakes for him are just being mayor and wanting to fix tourism and bring tourism and be, quote unquote, successful, you know, make the next bar harbor or whatever it is. But I think you learn from the kid that there are other stakes than that for him. And I think probably it needed that. But I am not surprised at your response. I do think television shows struggle to differentiate teenagers and

make them interesting and lovable and different. And often when the kid is supposed to create stakes for the parent, you get the kid being kind of distant and standoffish from the parent. And when that happens, the kid can be a cold presence. And I think when you say surly, I sort of get a chill between the kid and the parent. And that can make it difficult to kind of latch on to the teenage character when they're being used essentially as part of the story of the parent. I really agree. I think the show kind of did that character dirty because he's a character where I just had to force my brain to not think about him too much. Once you realize, oh, this kid has never been off the island. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That child is not

merely surly. That child is probably quite angry. That child has some issues going on. That child is sheltered. That child is more than a kid who goes off and smokes weed and flirts with the tourist girls. That child has some stuff going on, I will say mildly. And the show just kind of makes him, you know, yes, he lost his mother. He doesn't know his mother. It's very upsetting. And the show just doesn't give him the depth that that kid would most definitely have. And it's a real missed opportunity. Yeah. And I think also the show does not figure out any way in which he's funny. And that's one of these difficulties when you are on a show where everybody else is funny, at least part of the time. I'm so delighted that this show includes the absolutely delightful Kay Callan who, if you don't think you know who Kay Callan is, you may have seen Kay Callan as the great grandmother in Knives Out.

You may have seen Kay Callan many years ago as Clark Kent's mother on the Lois and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman, where she was always super funny and charming. she's always terrific and she's always effortlessly funny, even though her role, particularly at the beginning, is very small. And she seems to be just doing dottie old lady at the beginning. She's still really funny. And I think one of the challenges with the kid is they never figure out any way in which the kid or any of the scenes that involve the kid are funny. And I think it cuts the kid out of the show a little bit and makes the kid feel. added to the show, if that makes sense.

You nailed it. You isolated it. That's it. He does have one very good joke where he's talking to the sheriff, played by Kevin Carroll, who we haven't mentioned yet. He's from the leftovers. Another one of those, yes, that guy, actors in this show. He has one great joke when he's talking to the sheriff. I don't know if I want to give it away. Watch the show. I was cackling for a good few minutes after. Yeah, so I think we can say that we have quibbles here and there, but for the most part, a very satisfying show, a funny and fun show. And we do recommend it. Again, it's on Apple TV. The finale is coming right up as we are releasing this episode. So check it out for yourself. I think we all would recommend it. That brings us to the end of our show, Danielle Kurtzleben, Glenn Weldon. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Absolutely delighted. This episode is produced by Lenin Sherburn,

Hopsifah, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next time.