You have to watch Widow’s Bay

Screenshot: Apple TV

Widow’s Bay is a production designer’s dream, but the show’s commitment to comedy that you can see cuts across departments. The wardrobe and hair and makeup teams nudge the King fans in the ribs doing mayor’s assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) up in Wendy Torrance and Carrie White drag, then splash the whole audience with the cold-pig’s-blood punchline of how she’s actually dressed for a suspiciously well-attended cocktail reception. A drug trip brought on by the island’s native fungus is a gift to the editors, who cut Tom’s communion with nature into a discombobulating string of blackouts and lost time, and cinematographer Cody Jacobs, who throws every freaky lens, angle, and camera trick in his toolbox at the storyline—and if any of it comes across as corny or overwrought, well, that just makes it funnier.

Eagle-eyed credit watchers may recognize Jacobs and the series’ other director of photography, Christian Sprenger, as frequent collaborators of Atlanta and Barry director Hiro Murai. Murai’s on hand here, too, bringing the deft management of tone and style that unified those series’ flights of fancy to Widow’s Bay. He’s backed by Andrew DeYoung and Sam Donovan, whose episodes walk a line of fearful and funny linked by their directors to two of the most visually distinctive TV shows of the 2020s, The Chair Company and Severance.

Screenshot: Apple TV

The c.v. of the series’ fourth director, Ti West, attests to the other reason you can’t take your eyes off of Widow’s Bay for even a second: The visuals enhance the scares as well as the jokes. West’s flashback episode, “Our History,” boasts some gore-caked freakouts worthy of the X trilogy, but DeYoung one-ups him in the subsequent slasher riff “Your Baggage.” In the inky darkness of DeYoung and Jacobs’ compositions, the masked serial killer known as The Boogeyman can, and does, appear anywhere; it’s a chilling complement to the overhead shots of the nighttime cruise Tom and the Quint to his Mayor Vaughn, Wyck (Stephen Root), take in Donovan’s “Seasickness,” which render (with a vfx boost, I’d venture) the open water around their boat into an infinite void.

In these moments, it’s really only the cast’s reactions that act as a guide to whether or not we should laugh or scream. O’Flynn does a tremendous job of this during The Boogeyman’s pursuit of Patricia, conveying her character’s terror while underlining it with the eternal, “just my luck” frustration of a woman who’s forever begging to be taken seriously by a community that has every reason not to honor that request. Sometimes, the most compelling image results from simply pointing the camera at an actor; on that count, Widow’s Bay’s most valuable asset might be Matthew Rhys’ face. It helps the show tremendously that its star has the range, the look, and, thanks to The Americans and Perry Mason, the ample experience to convincingly say “I’m the most haunted man on television” with a single facial expression.

Erik Adams is The A.V. Club’s senior TV editor.