Matthew Rhys is fantastic in “Widow's Bay” The series moving through horror archetypes without losing irony, mystery, or creative freedom

How fantastic Matthew Rhys is, full stop. The 2026 Emmy nominations agree. Not one but two are the nominations he secured at the 78th edition, for The Beast in Me and, of course, Widow's Bay. Not his first nominations, either he already has a win to his name, awarded in 2018 for his role as Philip Jennings in The Americans.

Rhys is so charismatic that back in 2017 he even received a nomination for Best Guest Actor in a comedy series for Girls, starring in one of the most beautiful yet painful episodes of Lena Dunham's creation  one to watch with admiration for the performance and with revulsion at the nature of the character. And he is so talented that if you haven't seen the six seasons of The Americans that aired between 2013 and 2018, there's a very real risk you'll set aside everything you were doing, reading, and watching to start them, on the pretext that the show is on Disney+ and you really ought to get the most out of every platform you subscribe to.

The mythology of Widow's Bay

Fortunately, though, Widow's Bay is easier to catch up on or, if you've already seen it, to devour a second time  as is The Beast in Me, a Netflix miniseries. Ten episodes, running times ranging from thirty to forty minutes each, and the feeling of being in the presence of a novel for adults raised on a diet of Goosebumps who can now be indulged once again thanks to another excellent original produced by Apple TV+.

The series has a mythology and, as such, demands to be respected. Or rather, it is its structure that must follow the guidelines that creator Katie Dippold made clear from the very start: terror must be blended with a sharp irony, along with a veil of classicism, for a series that draws freely from the horrific, imaginative, and small-town architectures of Stephen King's work. The author is openly cited on the official poster, which recalls the retro style of the promotional billboards from Derry.

King's name also appears in the fourth episode, on the spine of one of the books sold by Patricia, the irresistible sidekick played by Kate O'Flynn, herself nominated at the Emmys in the category of Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. The writer has shown himself to be more drawn to another title in the Apple TV+ catalogue, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed with Tatiana Maslany. But if he has less affection for Widow's Bay, it doesn't matter  it just means we'll have enough affection for it ourselves.

An island of legends and horror archetypes

The narrative corpus of the series follows a horizontal storyline. Mayor Tom (Rhys) must figure out what is happening on the island he governs, which has suddenly been surrounded by a strange fog and from which the residents cannot leave. A place he was brought to by love and where love kept him: a widower raising a teenage son, Tom tries to do his best for the boy, who is constantly resistant to his father's attention. But everything begins to slip beyond his control — from the boy sneaking out without permission to the rumours about the island's curse, which he refuses to believe yet will inevitably be forced to accept in the face of terrifying and inexplicable evidence.

While the horizontal narrative branches out in search of explanations and clues, it is on the vertical level that the episodes do their work, offering each story fresh angles and drawing on the oldest archetypes in the world. Ti West directs the gothic episode dedicated to the ancestors and pioneers of Widow's Bay. Patricia/Kate O'Flynn is the protagonist of two episodes: in the first, a cursed object dictates the terms she must follow; in the second, she becomes the embodiment of the big-screen Final Girl, fleeing from a serial killer faithful to slasher conventions, with clear nods to Michael Myers from Halloween.

Widow's Bay draws from every narrative tradition that belongs to horror. There is genre cinema, and there is the folkloric tradition of the sea and small coastal towns. The witch who follows the smell of blood, the deceased who can only truly be called dead after crossing a certain threshold beyond the water, the rituals involving enormous effigies that call to mind The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy.

Matthew Rhys sets the tone

In each adventure and misadventure, alongside his helpers Patricia and Wyck, a consistently excellent Stephen Root, Matthew Rhys sets the temperature that every scene he appears in must have, whether comic, frightening, or grief-stricken. The strangeness at the root of Widow's Bay's horror is reflected in the strangeness of its humour, of which Rhys is the fulcrum, alongside the rest of the situations he finds himself in.

It is a fine line, one that only those with true command of the craft are able to cross time and again. The actor pulls it off because he knows how to calibrate to perfection the moments when he needs to be awkward or terrified  often both at once. And so you find yourself wandering with Tom through the narrow lanes of Widow's Bay, breathing in the sea air, feeling on your skin that something inexplicable that makes the hairs on your arms stand on end.

Nineteen nominations, between laughter and terror

In the year of horror, reflected on the big screen by Obsession and Backrooms, not to mention Camp Miasma: Adolescence, Sex and Death, with which Dippold's show shares several resonances, Widow's Bay is the episodic equivalent of an unmissable story: mysterious, funny, evocative, and eccentric, one that has reached the record of 19 nominations at the 2026 Emmys. A creative freedom that regenerates itself episode after episode, each one ready to be unwrapped like an enigma.

Even without a revelation, there remains the satisfaction of knowing that a second season will allow us to go deeper into the mystery. It's a comforting thought that there exists an island embodying everything that can make us laugh and terrify us at the same time: Widow's Bay may not be Martha's Vineyard, but it has its own charm all the same.