Apple TVThe Emmy Awards are often a difficult time for genre shows. Maybe a sci-fi or fantasy show would pick up a few trophies at the Creative Arts ceremony and get a nomination at a few of the big awards, but it’s often rare for genre shows to dominate. That is, it was rare until Apple TV. The streaming service has always valued genre series, and beginning with Severance in 2022, they have actually started to enter the conversation around the biggest awards of the year. But this year, Apple moved from a dark horse to a behemoth, taking home 28 awards, more than any other streamer. And for the first time, its major players across drama and comedy were both genre shows: Pluribus for drama and Widow’s Bay for comedy. Widow’s Bay was a surprising success, the first horror-comedy ever to win multiple Emmys. (The only other winning example is What We Do In The Shadows, which only won for its costumes in 2022.) But how did this strange show manage such a feat? The answers are all in the first episode. As a travel writer learns about Widow’s Bay’s strange legacy, so does the viewing audience. | Apple TVThe Widow’s Bay pilot, “Welcome to Widow’s Bay,” began as an idea showrunner Katie Dippold had nearly two decades ago. She held onto it for years, and even tried working it into a spec script for Parks and Recreation, but realized the show itself could only be its own thing and needed to be set in the Northeast. “I wanna feel like I’m in New England,” Dippold told Deadline. “I wanna feel like I am isolated, and I wanna feel like I could go explore this island and find all the little nooks and crannies and terrifying little spots. That’s my dream, but I’m strange. So, that’s sort of how it started.” The series opens with a terrifying cold open about a mariner out on the ocean, but soon cuts to our protagonist: Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), the frazzled small-town mayor of Widow’s Bay on the day an important travel writer comes into town. As this writer gets a tour of the island, so do we. Like most small towns, it’s full of quirky characters, but it’s clear Tom is trying to obscure the strange lore that swirls around the island. He doesn’t want Widow’s Bay to be the next Salem, he wants it to be the next Bar Harbor. Stephen Root’s Wyck warns Tom that something spooky is starting to descend. | Apple TVThis dichotomy is the balancing act the pilot pulls off so well: Tom is a Parks and Recreation character who’s living in a season of Supernatural, and those two tones are constantly pulling against each other. When fisherman Wyck (Stephen Root) warns about the incoming fog, Loftis immediately dismisses him, more concerned with keeping the lights on at the local restaurant. But it's the harbinger of the adventure that would play out over the show’s ten episodes: a supernatural curse that affects everyone, from the admins at the mayor’s office, to the original settlers of the island, and even the tourists. Tom Loftis may not want to admit it, but Widow’s Bay is fertile ground for both episodic horror stories and small-town slice-of-life moments. That may make it hard to categorize or describe, but it’s easy to see why this has won the hearts of viewers. Widow’s Bay is now streaming on Apple TV.