This post is the first in a new series I’m calling “What I Learned…” For years, I’ve been wrestling with reviews, their utility, why we even write them, who actually cares? That’s why I started approaching reviews not from a place of, “is this good or bad?” but from a place of, “what does this do, and who would find value in what it does?”
I realized what I was doing was putting a piece of storytelling under a microscope and trying to find elements of it that we could take forward with us. I was trying to figure out what I learned.
Ah! Eureka! An approach to talking about popular storytelling that’s both useful and easily accessible!
For writers, the utility is obvious. What can we learn about storytelling from this piece of storytelling?
For readers, though, I think it might be interesting to see how a writer experiences a piece of popular storytelling, so I hope there’s something in it for those types, too.
I’m starting with what I learned from Widow’s Bay, season one, and don’t worry. No spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet. These will always be spoiler free.
1. Horror and comedy operate similarly.
For a scare to work, you have to be prepared. Horror builds dread until the payoff. (Get out of here with your cheap jump scares.) Comedy works in much the same way. Comedy builds a mood before the punchline. Any standup comic will (probably) tell you a joke lives and dies on its delivery, but I know a lot goes into building to the punchline. There’s a vibe in the comedy club, and I imagine an experienced comic knows before they go on stage about how their set is going to go based on the mood people seem to be in.
The need to build to a fright or a laugh is irrefutable, and it would seem, because of that undeniable fact, horror and comedy would be incompatible. The moods that need to be set for horror or comedy to work would seem to be contradictory.
Yet horror-comedies exist, and I think there are plenty of horror-comedies where either the horror or the comedy overwhelms the other. Some of you might be aghast at titles I would cite, so I won’t, but I think, if we’re being honest with ourselves, many of the horror-comedies that are top of mind are more horror or comedy.
One of the feats that makes Widow’s Bay so notable is how it strikes a balance into true horror-comedy, and it isn’t in spite of the fact that horror and comedy function similarly but because of it.
2. Horror and comedy can coexist without one overwhelming the other.
I think they did it by utilizing different elements for dedicated vehicles of horror or comedy. The atmosphere is dread, dread, dread, but the characters build the laughs.
The horror of Widow’s Bay is interesting to me because it’s not easily categorizable. It’s difficult to pin down what kind of story it is at first because A). it obscures that with mystery and does so really effectively and B). it’s sort of a hodge podge of many horror categories by design.
For me, the most amazing part of Widow’s Bay is how it uses comedy to build endearment between the audience and the characters. The best horror is about flawed characters. Here, we see character flaws in slapstick moments of idiocy, weird flourishes of acting prowess, and simple human errors that lead to comedy.
Where most horror-comedy fails (again, for me) is when the comedy overwhelms the horror to the point that I no longer take the storytelling or the threat to the characters (or the characters themselves) seriously.
Horror has to maintain some semblance of believability to keep its atmosphere pumping its eerie foggy mist.
Widow’s Bay uses comedy as a source of levity to balance the dreadful atmosphere, and it does it in such a way that the comedy makes the characters more believable and more relatable. The magic of Widow’s Bay, for me, is that the comedy is not only for enjoyment but as a source of depth for the storytelling and the characters in that story. We like the characters more and are more invested in their fates because of the comedy, not in spite of it.
By balancing the genres, Widow’s Bay makes itself more believable instead of undermining itself.
3. Consistency of atmosphere is everything.
Think about virtually any show you’ve ever watched. Most of them stumble out of the gate because the people who are making that show don’t all have a thorough or common understanding of the show they’re making. That usually solidifies after a handful of episodes or even a season because, with each episode production, they all learn. Of course, whether the show drops week to week or all at once will have a significant effect on this aspect, but the point here is Widow’s Bay establishes an atmosphere from the first scene, and that atmosphere remains consistent throughout the first season.
Everything is in service of that atmosphere. It’s weird, surreal, uncanny, and while mystery presides and we do get some definition to that mystery, the island feels like it exists in this kind of stasis hidden from the world beyond its bordering waters.
The fog in the early episodes is a great mechanic for this sense, and time and again, there is a conflict between people who see this weirdness, who are caught in it, juxtaposed with the people who think Widow’s Bay is just this innocent, quaint island. That experience mirrors our own as viewers, too, so we feel some of what the characters feel.
Are we…are we going crazy, or is something weird going on here?
4. The meta experience is always at play, whether it’s manipulated or not.
I like to say every story is a speculative story. There is no such thing as realism in fiction because every fictional world is created or built by the author, even if the author thinks of it as the real world we all live in.
Them’s fightin’ words for some, I know, but I said what I said.
Similarly, the audience is always aware they’re experiencing a fictional story. We often refer tangentially to this as the suspension of disbelief, but the idea is the audience wants to be taken for a ride, so they come with a measure of charity toward the storyteller. I don’t know if Widow’s Bay intended to tell a story in which the characters doubted the supernatural nature of events while the audience was doing the same, but that’s what Widow’s Bay does.
We doubt the reality of the characters’ world as they doubt it, and that experience of mirrors creates a kind of bridge to the characters and then shakes it somewhat. That bridge exists in every story whether it’s built of solid steel or ropes through a windy canyon.
This isn’t uncommon, of course. Plenty of stories play with audience expectations, and in many ways, that’s the linchpin of a good mystery tale. But it’s a good reminder that audiences are aware they’re audiences and have come to experience a story. Widow’s Bay demonstrates how to acknowledge audience expectations and keep up the mystery without frustrating anyone.
5. Revelation enlightens characters, so don’t judge them too soon.
In the early episodes, I really didn’t like Evan, Mayor Tom Loftis’ son. I don’t mean I didn’t like the character (because we’re not supposed to). I mean I didn’t like the way he was written. He’s a punk to an unbelievable degree.
Revelation, however, enlightens why he’s so incredibly rebellious and mean to his dad, and it’s really, really interesting, playing on the idea of the weird and uncanny. We come to understand Evan has been acting out because he felt, somewhere deep down, that something was really, really wrong, but he didn’t know what. Evan is the focal point of what I suspected would be a poorly written character, but after the revelation, I understood that was the intention. We are not only supposed to dislike him. We’re supposed to question his authenticity because we’re trying to rectify it with our own.
See? Meta.
I’m reminded of feedback I received from a teacher a while back. On like page 80 of my manuscript, she wrote a comment to the effect of, “This is the character I thought I was reading,” and I cheered because it was in a flashback and I wanted that experience of the reader passing judgement on the character only to learn more about them in a very different context to make sense of what the reader had already judged them for.
It causes audiences to not only re-evaluate the character but to reflect on themselves. Why had they judged the character so quickly? What does that mean?
In any case, for writers, it means don’t fear leaning into a character’s portrayal up front if you intend to reveal another side of them later that makes sense of the earlier portrayal. Trust audiences to rectify those two interpretations of one character. That’s interesting!
6. Myth and lore can be whatever you want them to be as long as there’s a defined linchpin.
I wrote earlier that Widow’s Bay is difficult to categorize. Even after the whole season, I’m hard pressed to categorize Widow’s Bay within conventional horror subgenres. Is it a supernatural story? Yes. Is it a ghost story? Yes. Is it a slasher story? Yes. Is it a folk horror story? Yes. Is it a monster horror story? Yes. Is it a nature-as-horror story? Yes. Is it a psychological horror story? Yes.
It’s all of these categories, and there’s something that connects them all together. It isn’t clear what the linchpin is, but we know one exists, and that is satisfying enough for now.
I think herein lies Widow’s Bay’s greatest lesson: have fun with it. It’s clear everyone on this show had fun with it. They brought their creativity and their passion and put it into everything. Widow’s Bay is great because it is hard to categorize, because it doesn’t conform. Audiences need something solid to hold onto during the story, but as long as they have that, you can throw anything you want at them, and they’ll go with it.
Okay, but like, is it good? Will I like it?
I very much did. I think it’s an excellent example of horror-comedy done right so that neither the horror nor the comedy overwhelms the other. I think the horror and the comedy work well together but that’s beside the point that Widow’s Bay is telling an interesting, moving story with good characters set on an alluring island you both want to visit and stay a hundred miles away from. I learn from every story I consume. This one taught me a lot while telling me a great story and reminding me why I love storytelling.
I can’t ask for more than that, honestly.