{"id":23371,"date":"2026-06-18T11:54:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T19:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=23371"},"modified":"2026-06-18T11:54:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T19:54:00","slug":"widows-bay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2026\/06\/18\/widows-bay\/","title":{"rendered":"Widow&#8217;s Bay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did you watch this fakokta show?<\/p>\n<p>I have a policy. If Felice wants to watch something, I will give it a shot, assuming the show has high Rotten Tomatoes ratings and is fully available.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Widow&#8217;s Bay&#8221; has EXCELLENT Rotten Tomatoes ratings, 98\/93, and you know I&#8217;ll watch anything that exceeds 80. And, it finished last night, the tenth episode aired June 17th.<\/p>\n<p>God help you if you took two months to watch this show week by week. I&#8217;d be tearing my hair out, waiting for a big reveal&#8230; There is a bit of a buildup, but then, in classic non-American streaming style, there&#8217;s not complete resolution because they&#8217;re setting it up for a second season!<\/p>\n<p>So what we&#8217;ve got here is Keri Russell&#8217;s husband, Matthew Rhys, as mayor of an island off the Maine coast, Widow&#8217;s Bay. Who would&#8217;a thunk that Felicity would turn into one of our finest actresses, starring in A-level product like &#8220;The Diplomat&#8221;? And she met Rhys doing another great series, &#8220;The Americans,&#8221; and now I pay attention to him too.<\/p>\n<p>So the bottom line is Widow&#8217;s Bay is haunted.<\/p>\n<p>So this is a horror show, right?<\/p>\n<p>Well, that&#8217;s something you&#8217;re debating from square one, you&#8217;re flummoxed by the tone. Am I supposed to be scared or should I be laughing? Should I take this seriously?<\/p>\n<p>Rhys wants to increase tourism, but many residents believe the island is haunted. Is it?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it appears that it is. And they even go back hundreds of years, they spend an entire episode delineating the curse, with Betty Gilpin as a mail order bride and&#8230; It&#8217;s so whacked. Just coming up with this. I give the producers credit, but I&#8217;m not exactly sure how it all fits together.<\/p>\n<p>And in many ways it doesn&#8217;t. But there are episodes.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, there are two&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>One involves Kate O&#8217;Flynn as Patricia Moyer, Rhys&#8217;s assistant. O&#8217;Flynn looks like a cross between Illeana Douglas and Shelley Duvall. She&#8217;s got a bit of a weak chin, and she&#8217;s not classically beautiful, but she&#8217;s dedicated to her job, you can count on her&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But she&#8217;s an outcast. The hip group of girls she grew up with on the island want nothing to do with her. This is such a great demonstration of this paradigm&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s how the world works. There are insiders and outsiders. And some of these outsiders are happy in their backwaters, but a lot of these outsiders just wish they could be in the inside group.<\/p>\n<p>But they don&#8217;t understand the inside group dynamics. Which are based on groupthink, usually signaled by a leader. You fawn and get along, color outside the lines and you&#8217;re ostracized.<\/p>\n<p>And then there are those who are aware they&#8217;re not in the hip group, but they just can&#8217;t understand why, like Patricia.<\/p>\n<p>So she stumbles on a book that says if you throw a party you&#8217;ll be popular and&#8230; If you ever went to high school, you&#8217;ll wince. Assuming you were not one of the insiders.<\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s the episode with the shaman. This is utterly hysterical. I mean I couldn&#8217;t stop laughing (and at certain other times in this show too, when it wasn&#8217;t flat or I wasn&#8217;t scared or&#8230;) The mayor and Patricia and Wyck go to see Chris Fleming as Todd O&#8217;Connor, because they want to know about the mushrooms the pastor ate&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Oh, you&#8217;ve been there. But this is on an island! The guy with the long hair, with a drawer full of drugs, and the jargon&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t dark drug dealer. This guy isn&#8217;t about earning millions, but enlightenment. Just talk to someone who&#8217;s done ayahuasca. They describe a religious experience. And it&#8217;s all led by a shaman, like this guy. They take it so seriously, as if they have the answer and you don&#8217;t. But this is played for laughs, and I was more than chuckling, tears were nearly coming to my eyes.<\/p>\n<p>And those episodes, #4 and #5, &#8220;Beach Reads&#8221; and &#8220;What to Expect on Your Trip,&#8221; are worth the price of your time. I thought they were a turn in the arc, that the series had hit its stride, sometimes it takes a few episodes to find the groove. But this was not the case.<\/p>\n<p>So, if you start this show and it feels a bit dry, if it doesn&#8217;t strike your funny bone or maintain your interest or&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>STOP!<\/p>\n<p>I do not even recommend you start. Despite the hype, stay away from this show, you will want your time back.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m scratching my head&#8230; Does everything on Apple get a pass? Is this the Emperor&#8217;s New Clothes? I mean the creators were taking some risks, but that does not mean the end result is worth it.<\/p>\n<p>What did you think?<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did you watch this fakokta show? I have a policy. If Felice wants to watch something, I will give it a shot, assuming the show has high Rotten Tomatoes ratings and is fully available. &#8220;Widow&#8217;s Bay&#8221; has EXCELLENT Rotten Tomatoes ratings, 98\/93, and you know I&#8217;ll watch anything that exceeds 80. And, it finished last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-64X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23372,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23371\/revisions\/23372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}