Welcome to Widow’s Bay is a custom video series produced by Ankler Media executive producer of brand experiences Jennifer Laski. This video is presented by Apple.
For a series as tonally tricky as Apple’s Widow’s Bay — a show indebted equally to comedies like Parks and Recreation and The Office and to the work of Stephen King — its editing team knew they had to toe a very specific line.
“It was very much a question of how much comedy can we put in before it starts to get in the way of the horror?” says editor Isaac Hagy. “And so we take it right up to that line, and then maybe add one more joke.”
Created by Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation), Widow’s Bay focuses on a New England island community wrestling with an ancient curse, as its mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), tries to turn the town into a bustling tourist spot.
“They shot the first three episodes at the same time, so we were all getting footage the same week as they were shooting, and we’d just constantly be calling each other into everyone’s rooms, being like, ‘Come here, you have to see this scene,’” says Hagy, an Emmy nominee for editing the show’s sixth episode, “Our History,” a flashback to the origins of Widow’s Bay.
Hagy and fellow Emmy-nominated editors Kyle Reiter (the pilot episode, “Welcome to Widow’s Bay!”) and Jen Bryson (the fifth episode, “What to Expect on Your Trip,” where Tom eats hallucinogenic mushrooms) have worked together for about a decade, starting with Atlanta. “We have a real shorthand with each other,” Hagy says. “When we’re working in the edit bay, we are the first audience for each other. And since we all trust each other’s opinions at this point, the best idea wins. And sometimes that’s coming from another editor who’s not even editing that episode.”
The individual Emmy recognition for the three editors is among 19 total nominations received by Widow’s Bay this year — including best comedy series, best comedy actor for Rhys and best comedy supporting actress for Kate O’Flynn.
“Looking at Matthew’s dailies, even from day one of getting this stuff, I was just sort of blown away,” says Reiter, a five-time Emmy nominee. “It became really exciting to sort of dig out those little comedy moments.”
“It’s so exciting when you have options, and you’re not just wrestling with performance because of those little things,” adds Bryson, a first-time nominee.
For her episode — directed by Andrew DeYoung — Bryson was invigorated by the challenge that Tom’s drug trip wasn’t going to be depicted using computer-enhanced effects, but instead tricks done within the camera.
“I took that as evidence of what the whole episode should feel like,” she says. “It should feel offbeat. So I started finding places that I could surprise people with the edit.”
At one point, as Tom struggles with the door while trying to enter a gas station convenience store, Bryson added a comedic chime to enhance the physical comedy Rhys was doing.
“I went into Kyle’s office because I knew he had a scene in the gas station as well, and I said, ‘I’m going to use the sound effect; you have to use it, too.’ So he was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do that,’” Bryson says.
But when Reiter pulled up the scene from his earlier episode, Bryson noticed that he had included Nine Days’ 2000 pop-rock hit, “Absolutely (Story of a Girl),” as diegetic music playing in the shop. It led Bryson to make the same creative choice for her episode, picking 311’s “Amber” for the gas station sequence; the track later returns at the episode’s end.
“That just came from a moment of playing around approaching my colleague and saying, ‘This is funny, right?’” Bryson says. “And him being like, ‘Yeah, isn’t this funny?’ And then in collaboration, we made something fun.”
For Hagy, the challenge of his episode was moving away from the core of what made Widow’s Bay so successful — its regular cast and setting.
“How do you make it feel like a cohesive puzzle piece?” he says of the episode, which is set in 1702 and features guest acting nominees Hamish Linklater and Betty Gilpin as the island’s founding couple, Richard and Sarah Warren.
“For us, it was really the tone — that was the thing that threaded episode six into the rest of the series, and that tone was the mix of horror and comedy,” he adds, singling out Gilpin in particular as the North Star of the episode.
“That’s the fun of the show in general: You take these characters, and you put them in very horrific, dangerous situations, and you treat those situations as real,” Nagy adds. “And then the comedy comes from how the characters specifically react to those situations.”
Bryson, Reiter and Hagy are among multiple artisans nominated for Widow’s Bay, including production designer Steve Arnold and music supervisor Toko Nagata as well as director Hiro Murai (who also worked on Atlanta and Mr. & Mrs. Smith).
“We’re so lucky that we get to work in a group of people that is so talented, like Hiro and Katie,” Bryson says. “They are so great at curating teams, and I think this show really proves that you can collect a bunch of passionate creatives who are also good people and cool to be around, and you can make something amazing because of it.”
