In spring 2025, OpenAI rolled out an update of ChatGPT that featured a new image generator. The update proved wildly popular in large part due to how easy this new tool made it for users to produce polished custom images of whatever they could dream to prompt. What wild fabulations would OpenAI’s user base conjure? What feats of imagination might these newly democratized users perform? Turns out, most people just wanted to ask ChatGPT to reproduce celebrities and movie scenes and viral meme formats in the style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Within hours, the internet was flooded with uncanny Ghibliesque images of Kramer from Seinfeld, Mike Tyson, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at himself on TV.
These images say a lot about the state of AI and creative work. They foreground the kind of proud, amoral acts of copyright infringement, or at least copyright edging, that sustain companies from OpenAI to Anthropic. They apply a warm and friendly filter on a technology whose promise is the total transformation (and possible inadvertent annihilation) of society. And, more than that, they appropriate the work of an artist who is repulsed by the rise of this technology: In a clip from 2016 that’s been in active circulation online in the past few years, Miyazaki famously said he was “disgusted” by AI animation. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said.
[Blank] meets [blank] or [blank] in the style of [blank] has become the signature grammatical structure and logic of genAI content: “Seinfeld in the style of Hayao Miyazaki …” But that prompt format is age-old: It’s been the structure of the Hollywood elevator pitch since forever. And, in TV’s private equity era, it’s become the rigid refrain of the risk-averse executive. The creative logic of an increasingly derivative media environment mirrors the corporate logic of an industry rooted in derivation. In many ways, the imaginative grammar of genAI itself descends from this lowest-common-denominator vision of art practice.
Recently, it’s been tempting to point this out when a thinly, cynically conceived show flops. This show feels like a ChatGPT prompt! But it’s also true that many of the greatest TV writers now working have been forced to adapt their skills to this combinative mode, to become prompt hackers. Severance is The Office meets Lost. Andor is The Wire in the style of The Mandalorian. Simple ways to make risks look safe, to make a complicated idea seem easier to swallow. Culture right now, we are often told, is stuck, directionless, stale, deliberately stagnated, preprocessed. On TV, this looks like the constant churn of reboots, religious fidelity to existing IP, algorithmically synthesized protein bars of content.
Sometimes, though, a show comes along that’s such an extravagant bespoke amalgam of forms, such a whirligig of influence and reference that all of its overlapping echoes turn into a single, caterwauling, startlingly new sound. Welcome to Widow’s Bay, which feels a lot like somewhere you’ve never been before.
The easiest way to describe Widow’s Bay, now on Apple TV, is that it’s a New England Gothic Parks and Recreation. The show’s creator, Katie Dippold, in fact spent years chronicling the municipal bureaucracy of Pawnee, Indiana, and has gone on to work on a string of action comedies from The Heat to the gender-swapped Ghostbusters reboot. But that combination of references doesn’t quite sum up this show. It’s also The Andy Griffith Show by way of Twin Peaks. Possibly it’s The X-Files in the style of Veep. Is it Stranger Things meets The Lowdown? Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? if it was written entirely by Matthew Weiner in dream sequence mode? Damon Lindelof’s Goosebumps? Stephen King’s The Good Place? Rob Reiner’s Halloween?
The point of listing all these references is to say that, while attentive viewers will surely notice them bobbing and weaving through this show’s 10 episodes, Dippold and her writers are never beholden to them, never seemingly constrained or confused by this revolving door of contrasting tones and styles. Indeed, the most impressive part about Widow’s Bay—to my mind, the sole contender for best new show of the year at this point—is how in control it is. It takes a formula that’s optimized to produce the smug smirk of recognition, the comforting thrall of nostalgia, the feeling of a successful Easter egg hunt, and, instead, surprises us again and again.
Widow’s Bay is a small island off the coast of New England. Neither a tourist trap nor a luxury destination, it’s mostly the home of a salty crew of townies who make up its rotting driftwood foundations. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is something of an outsider, a mainlander, who married a native Widow’s Bay woman in his youth and stayed. When we meet him, he himself is a widower whose rambunctious, stir-crazy son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) wants nothing more than to leave the island behind forever. For reasons both mundane and mysterious: He can’t. Tom is trying as hard as he can to turn Widow’s Bay—too late—into the kind of bustling coastal destination that his son might be proud to call home, but he is beset on all sides by the locals who hate him (he ran unopposed), the City Hall staffers who don’t respect him, and the powerful occult forces of ancient evil that lurk deep in the heart of the island. The show is Jaws, from the perspective of the mayor of Amity Island.
Widow’s Bay is a horror-comedy that manages to be both an incredibly funny and dense laugh-out-loud joke machine and a genuinely scary and menacing fright fest. Neither generic marker takes precedence over the other; they are mutually, ecstatically intertwined. It’s an incredibly difficult tonal balancing act, and one of the thrills of the early episodes is watching the show’s writers and directors pull it off with such aplomb. The major obstacle to Tom’s dream of turning Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard is that the island is obviously, excessively cursed. Demons, ghosts, witches, zombies, serial killers, unholy monsters, natural disasters, haunted houses, haunted hotels, haunted bookmobiles—Widow’s Bay has it all. And while visiting tourists are charmed by the deep well of island lore and superstition (an early plot point is Tom’s successful campaign to get The New York Times to run a glowing travel feature about Widow’s Bay), locals know it to be more than folksy legend.
So, the show’s horror aspects provide the madcap “situations” for its sitcom aspects to feast upon. And they do. One episode is an extended, slapstick final girl chase sequence performed with perfect comic precision by Kate O’Flynn, who steals every scene she’s in; another episode is a supernatural, shipboard Jaws homage that unfolds with the farcical rhythm of Frasier.
In an early standout episode, Tom spends the night as a guest at the island’s haunted inn to prove to the islanders that it isn’t haunted, occasioning a cascade of brackish humor and jump scares. There are faintly audible screams coming through the vents in his room; the man in the hotel welcome video wanders off out of frame never to return; Tom befriends the affable traveling businessman in the room next to his only to be stalked and attacked by him later.
The show’s writers are adept at sight gags, and the hotel is stacked to the ceiling with them. At one point, Tom picks up a dusty board game from an ancient-looking cupboard. The cover simply says TEETH, and when he opens it, the box contains only a single pair of pliers. Every joke in this show feels handcrafted, a box with something startling inside. The viewer, then, is encouraged to pay extra attention to the surroundings, scanning for what’s hidden in every frame—the same way, incidentally, that you might watch a horror movie.
Is it yet too banal an observation to say that the fatal flaw of AI-generated content is its lack of humanity? [Blank] in the style of [blank] is an equation, not an idea. The resulting products might be diverting or clever or even lovable, but they are, at the same time, cold, lifeless, inhumane. The same can sometimes be true of creative works built on that model. To conceive of a television show or a film as a mere contraption, the network of references as a kind of electrical wiring, is to miss the point—the conscious or unconscious act of recognition, on the part of the viewer, a spark. The prompt format can be helpful as a marketing tool to describe a work of art; it is deadly to conceive of one that way.
Widow’s Bay might well have been a chilly recitation of recognizable images and forms if it hadn’t been for the care of its writers, the virtuosity of its directors (from TV visionary Hiro Murai to buzzy auteurs like Ti West and Andrew DeYoung), and, most of all, the miraculous intercession of its casting director. O’Flynn as Tom’s socially inept right-hand woman is the show’s secret weapon, ably dropping deadpan one-liners. Stephen Root does what he does best as an old salt, and so does the incredible character actress Dale Dickey. Kevin Carroll, as the skeptical sheriff, is a welcome sight since his days on The Leftovers (another show whose crackpot depiction of grief is detectable as DNA here), and you know a show is working with a deep bench when the legend Jeff Hiller is just hanging around in the background.
But the thing that makes all of this hold together is Matthew Rhys, giving what’s easily his best performance since his Emmy-winning turn on The Americans. TV writers and filmmakers have struggled to figure out how to harness his uniquely charismatic qualities in the intervening years. He’s been cast for his soft menace and smothered rage (The Beast in Me, Death Comes to Pemberley), and he’s been cast for his hapless depressive manner (Perry Mason, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). But these casting decisions somewhat misremember what was so great about his performance on The Americans. Yes, he could be menacing, and yes, he could be depressive. But he could also be very, very funny. Much like his prestige TV contemporary Elisabeth Moss, Matthew Rhys has had a hard time getting cast in comic roles, despite the fact that his ability to seamlessly cross-fade between comedy and tragedy, between sitcom dad and killer, was what defined his early breakout. Widow’s Bay is a show built around that ability to switch between modes. It’s an ingratiating, instantly unmissable performance, an actorly feat of alchemy, a hilariously, terrifyingly human thing.
