Critic Reviews

Widow’s Peak is rich and wonderful. Grownup, funny, scary, true – Mare of Easttown meets Schitt’s Creek, but with something else that makes it singular.

With its diverse elements coming together like lightning in a bottle, Widow’s Bay is a destination well worth visiting.

A charmingly ghoulish saga about a locale beset by the sins of the past. It’s also, to date, the best new show of the year.

Another distinctive addition to Apple TV’s impressive library that delivered several agonizing jump scares, loads of laughs, and intrigued until the last second of the 10 episode season.

That awkward, comedic, and suspenseful tension may be a lot to get through, but it's designed to ensure we get the most we can from the horror genre. At this point, it can hardly be denied that Apple TV has mastered a rare sort of art.

It is truly unlike anything else on TV, a wild swing of tonal shifts that works because it commits so fully to both halves of the equation.

Widow’s Bay plays like a mixtape of the Master of the Macabre’s work, compiling stock horror archetypes and scenarios before running them through a mondo bizarro filter.

As soon as the series confirms the haunt is real (and spook-tacular), it kicks off a stellar run of episodes that expand the town lore and sharpen its characters in rapid, imaginative succession.

And, though they're not without laughs, it's easy to miss the more leisurely, comedy-forward tone of the early episodes once the plot fully kicks in and the perils mount. But that likely won't bother those who showed up for the horror in the first place or those won over by Widow's Bay's compelling eccentric characters and even more eccentric setting.

Such tonal shifts make Katie Dippold’s show one peculiar barrel of fish, much in the way that Atlanta or Barry were uncategorisable (Hiro Murai, this show’s director, also worked on those). Which means, I suspect, just as many will find it frustrating as will applaud it for being like nothing else around.