Widow’s Bay, Season 1, starts off with a bang. Four especially good, indeed excellent, episodes of TV. So good in fact, that the rest of the season must only be explored as a cautionary tale. Whatever went wrong here, and we can guess and will guess as to the bureaucratic and structural reasons, should not be allowed to happen again to any other TV series.
Widow’s Bay takes place on an isolated New England isle, just like the setting of Jaws (1975) and Midnight Mass (2021). Indeed, while watching the first several episodes of this series, one is gripped with the anticipation that this series might make a perfect trifecta. It is helped in large part by the direction of Hiro Murai of Atlanta fame who helmed Episodes 1, 2, 3 and then 9 and 10. Hiro earns the comparison with the Coen Brothers with what he has achieved first in Atlanta, then the best parts of The Bear, and then here in Widow’s Bay. It shares the feeling with the best of the Coen Brothers’ movies that the world outside the frame holds more than what is in the frame. (Whereas inferior movies barely can hold what is currently in the frame. I spoke about this in depth in my review of Atlanta.)
We are presented with the mayor of a small island town (Matthew Rhys) who is desperately trying to boost the tourism trade and bring in fresh money from the mainland. Holding him back are the skeptical locals, including one downright hostile old coot (Stephen Root) who believes it would be irresponsible to bring any new people to the island as the place is and always has been cursed. Rounding out what will effectively be a three-person main cast is Kate O’Flynn as one of the Mayor’s administrative assistants. None of these actors are known for being comedians. (The biggest leap, Kate O’Flynn, is not known at all) But the surehandedness of the script, the keen direction of Mr. Murai, and the tone set by creator Kate Dippold, draw from them some excellent comedic performances. The first four episodes of Widow’s Bay are especially funny and increasingly scary.
They are also tight in space and time. Which perhaps unfairly promises the viewer that the rest of the episodes will be as perfectly constructed. Unfortunately, after what appears to be a storyline in which most, if not all, of the scenes matter, it then devolves into a series of stalling maneuvers until you get to the final episode where you realize with a sort of angst and dread that the story-lines might never resolve. A shame indeed that this very promising TV series might actually be transforming before our eyes into a commercialized TV series doomed to continue forever, elongated by its own popularity, until it gets so bad that no-one wants to watch it anymore.
For the life of me, I do not understand why we are in this predicament. This is a TV series on AppleTV+. It is a subscription service. There are no advertisers. Why is there pressure to have more material than is needed to tell the story? Why are there 10 episodes, when six would do just as well for the first season? The audience does not require nor need at least 10 episodes in any given season of a TV series. This is a strange holdover from broadcast TV series, which gave us the format as a necessity for advertisers. If the audience is footing the bill, there should be no pressure to give them more than what the story requires (wouldn’t it be cheaper to stop sooner rather than later). We draw the line at 3-hour movies. Why is anyone insisting on a 10-hour television series?
Much has been said about when a television series “jumps the shark”. This relates to an episode of Happy Days from the 70s (no, I’ve never seen it) when a character visits the beach, goes water-skiing, and just so happens to escape a shark attack. This was a TV show about a bunch of teenagers in high school or something. But after so many seasons, the writers were desperately looking for ways to up-the-game in order to keep the audience engaged.
If Widow’s Bay hasn’t had that exact moment yet, it is getting there. The thing is, the better a dramatic piece of story telling is, the earlier the “jump the shark” moment occurs. You simply cannot have dramatic revelations in every single episode before you start wondering why the characters don’t change.
And that is the second thing. For a comedic television series to have any legs, the characters can’t change. Seinfeld is a great example of this in practice. There was a rule that the characters “wouldn’t hug, wouldn’t learn”, because if they did either, then it wouldn’t make sense for them to continue to be funny in the same way. A series like Widow’s Bay which starts out both funny and dramatic needs to have a clear game plan, because the longer it goes on, the less funny and less dramatic it will be. Those elements will cannibalize each other. To put it another way, comedy comes from characters being ignorant and drama comes from realization. That arc only goes one way. Once the characters definitely know the island is cursed, no further comedy can be mined from a situation in which they do not know it yet.
(If a dramatic TV series eventually “jumps the shark”, a similar occurrence can happen to a comedic TV series when it eventually devolves into parody. That is, the unique storyline of the TV series plays itself out and then the writers start commenting on already existing pop culture because they are at a loss for original plots. Widow’s Bay may or may not have “jumped the shark”. It has definitely devolved into parody. This undoubtedly occurred in Episode 8, Your Baggage, in which Kate O’Flynn did her best Jamie Lee Curtis running and screaming down abandoned suburban streets being chased by a masked killer a la Halloween.)
And once the revelations occur, in particular the revelations in the father-son dynamic between Matthew Rhys and his teenage son, to work effectively, they demand resolution of the story. You can’t have a never-ending drama. After a while it loses its effectiveness and, worse yet, harms the memory of the earlier episodes. For as strong as Widow’s Bay started, by the ending of the last episode, it has itself a major problem that I doubt can be solved.
(By the way, I stopped watching Severance half way through the Second Season because they didn’t solve this same kind of problem. This issue may just be an AppleTV thing).
Here is my proposal for a remedy. The haunting of Widow’s Bay becomes publicly known, but instead of driving away tourists, they create a marketplace for the kind of tourist that seeks out haunted places. The main characters try their best to make people stay away and/or leave, but the harder they try, the more weird shit occurs and the more the island becomes famous and draws in more crowds.
In this way, the plight of Widow’s Bay can become a metaphor for the nightmare of success that many TV series find themselves in. Everyone wants to end the show, but they can’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment