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.
Production designer Steve Arnold knows his way around a creepy New England setting — previous credits for the four-time Emmy nominee include Midnight Mass and Castle Rock, shows set in the region.
But for Widow’s Bay, he had an entirely new challenge.
“I wanted to keep it looking as remote and arcane as this island was supposed to be,” he says of the haunted island town that gives the show its title. No small task: As revealed in season one of the Apple comedy, the origin of Widow’s Bay dates back to the 17th century. “There were no people here when they arrived; they had to build everything from scratch during what is still believed to be the harshest winter in Widow’s Bay history,” Arnold says.
It was in conversations he had with Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold and executive producer and primary director Hiro Murai that the show’s look came into focus. “We wanted it based in reality,” Arnold says. “It wasn’t a fantasy world or anything like that.”
A 19-time Emmy nominee for its breakout first season — including recognition for Arnold, supervising art director Peter Borck and set decorator Jennifer Engel in the production design category for half-hour shows — Widow’s Bay focuses on the title community, whose residents do their best to navigate a centuries-old curse.
“This required that sort of faded, washed-out, seaside, weathered feeling in all of it,” Arnold says, acknowledging the challenge of creating an island town on the mainland. (The comedy series was filmed around Massachusetts.) Take the town hall. “The building that we used for the exterior of that was built in the 1800s, but I wanted the inside to seem like maybe they had redone it in the 1950s, and that it kind of just was stuck there — they hadn’t really upgraded past that,” Arnold says. “That was all just something that I would devise or think of, and then present Katie and Hiro and say, ‘What do you think about this?’”
Arnold and the production design team are nominated for the show’s second episode, “Lodging,” where lead character Tom Loftis (Emmy nominee Matthew Rhys), the well-meaning but overmatched mayor of Widow’s Bay, spends the night at the town’s Breakwater Inn to prove it’s not haunted. But as Tom quickly realizes, his confidence in the mundane is misplaced.
“The ‘Lodging’ script just spoke to The Shining,” Arnold says, of the creepy (but funny) episode, written by Kelly Galuska and directed by Murai.
Inside the Breakwater Inn, Tom is confronted by a host of surreal board games, with titles like Teeth — a game that comes, ominously, with a set of old pliers. “I would show them ideas for what the box would look like — and we actually went through many different pairs of pliers to see which pliers would be the best,” Arnold says of the prop. “A lot of thought went into that.”
A similar level of detail went into the hotel’s basement. During his one-night stay, Tom befriends the only other guest, William (guest star Tim Baltz) — and it all seems fine, until William is revealed to be a long-dead 1950s serial killer nicknamed Willy the Clown, who chases Tom in the crawl space.
Arnold built that entire set — the basement and its crawl space — and even designed it in a forced perspective. “So it got smaller and smaller as you got farther and farther in,” he says, of creating the claustrophobic effect. “We actually had a movable wall at the back so that we could make it seem even deeper into the crawl space.”
The Shining and the work of Stephen King were not the only influences Dippold has cited for Widow’s Bay — she’s compared the show to the experience of visiting a funhouse as a child on the Jersey Shore, where scares and laughs would coexist, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
“We tried to copy as much as we could,” Arnold says of Dippold’s inspirations, “just for fun.”
