‘People want original shows’: How Widow’s Bay became the biggest thing on TV

Katie Dippold can’t help but lurk online to see what people are saying about her hit TV show Widow’s Bay. When it premiered in April, the answer was: not much. Though the show earned five-star reviews from critics, it was a slow burn with audiences.

The 10-part horror-comedy series about a cursed island and the challenges faced by its reluctant and unprepared mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) has picked up incredible word-of-mouth buzz in its last half, and Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro is among its most vocal fans. “Widow’s Bay may very well be the best streaming series in a long time,” he wrote on X. “And hands down one of the most mesmerising acts of narrative prestidigitation in horror”.

“That was crazy,” Dippold, a long-time comedy writer, recalls over Zoom. She’s sitting in front of a bookshelf with titles that could have been pulled straight from the set of the show’s Breakwater Inn –50 Great Ghost Stories, Hide and Seek and Cats for Dummies – but, laughing, she insists they’re not Easter eggs for me. “I was out to dinner, and when I walked out, my phone had so many messages,” she says. “It was like, ‘What terrible emergency has happened?’ And then I saw what it was, and I’m like, ‘Oh, it did warrant that excitement.’

“[All this response] is much more positive than what I’ve seen before.”

Originally conceived by Dippold as a spec script to get a writing job on Parks and Recreation, the kooky story had been rattling around her head for the better part of two decades.

She initially tried to get the show made in the early 2010s, after finishing up on that beloved sitcom and penning the hugely successful Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy film The Heat, but ultimately decided against it because it felt too comedic.

“It was more of a joke factory,” she says. “There was no tension. There were no stakes. It wasn’t very grounded. And as a horror fan, I wanted to feel like I could be immersed in this island … There was a long time when [the script] was neither here nor there – it wasn’t funny or scary – and that was a really dark time. But I just could not stop working on it.”

“I would go to museums and imagine what the Widow’s Bay version would be in the display cases, and then I started thinking about the mythology and the history of the island. Once I started doing that, and it started feeling like a real place, it just opened things up for me.”

That depth of thought shows in the series’ texture and originality. Widow’s Bay is a hugely inventive show that swings from monster-of-the-week horror to workplace sitcom to period piece t