On Screen: “Widow’s Bay”

Widow’s Bay

“Widow’s Bay” has received 19 nominations for Emmy Awards — with the presentation set for Monday, September 14 — including Outstanding Comedy Series and Matthew Rhys as Lead Actor in a Comedy Series.

Rhys plays Mayor Tom Loftis, who is desperately trying to promote tourism in his small island town, located 40 miles off the New England coast, while confronting its historic curse (“Anyone born in Widow’s Bay cannot leave”) and ominous supernatural occurrences.

Sure, there’s a sharp-clawed sea hag and killer clown lurking in the dense fog, along with bogeymen, but why let some sinister signs interfere with commerce, particularly when the restaurant has recently installed an espresso machine?

Ecstatic when a visiting travel reporter couples Widow’s Bay with Martha’s Vineyard in a newspaper article, Mayor Tom Loftis is determined that his coastal town will overcome serial killings and rumors of cannibalism (way back in 1786) — not to mention its current lack of reliable cell service and Wi-Fi.

Creator-showrunner Katie Dippold geared the original pitch to comedy until Matthew Rhys came aboard and fleshed out the bleak horror aspect that was always lurking in the background, particularly when he accepts a dare to spend the night in the old, reputedly haunted hotel.

Drawing on the remarkable versatility he evidenced in “The Americans” and as the wife-murder suspect in “The Beast in Me,” Rhys added another dimension, embodying Tom as an exasperated widower with an intractable adolescent son (Kingston Rumi Southwick).

In addition, there are a slew of colorful, amusing characters like Tom’s lonely, neurotic assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), Sheriff Bechir Clemons (Kevin Carroll), gossipy Rosemary (Dale Dickey), elderly Ruth (K Callan), and historian (Nancy Leneham).

Perhaps the most memorable is the salty, doomsday prophetic fisherman Wyck (Stephen Root), an old-timer who remembers Tom as a born-off-island child, visiting his alcoholic father “who never should have had a kid.”