Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorn. So there is a new show on streaming. It's called Widows Bay.

Been out for a little bit. Maybe you heard about it. Here's the premise.

Widows Bay is a small, picturesque island off the coast of New England. The tiny town on this island has it all.

Beautiful buildings, charming seafood shacks, eccentric locals, and also a dark, possibly supernatural past. If this premise sounds familiar to you, well, congratulations. That means that you have

seen like one of 25% of the horror

films and TV shows of the last 40 years. I mean, Pet Cemetery, Beetlejuice, The Lighthouse, Jaws.

Widows Bay nods to all those great works and to others, but it's also nothing like them. First of all,

it's funny,

not like scary movie funny. The jokes when a character does tell a joke are subtle.

There are a lot of visual gags. Nothing is really spoofed. And that's because the show doesn't spoof

anything. And because the show doesn't spoof anything, it's also

legitimately kind of scary. People are in real peril. Creepy, ghosty figures appear in

frame and then vanish. Like here's a good example. I'll try not to give you too much spoiler.

In one episode, a supernatural humanoid creature appears, and throughout this

episode, nobody on the island knows where they stand with that creature. In one moment,

it's motionless, still and brooding and ominous, and then later it weeps over the loss of the

loved ones that it once had. And then at another point, the creature trades obscenities with Matthew Reese, who plays

the mayor of Widows Bay.

Fuck me?

No.

Fuck you!

...