Steve on TV: A cursed island, adolescent castaways and a sloppy Spielberg homage

If you’re shopping for scenic islands to visit this summer, I can recommend a couple — but only via the safety of your preferred screen. Hard to pin down — dry character comedy one minute, neck-prickling horror the next — Widow’s Bay on Apple TV+ is my favorite watch in months. That’s not despite its tonal fluctuations but because of them. Watching, you can feel as unsettled as the townsfolk of the titular New England isle, some 40 miles off the mainland’s coast. Some locals believe the place might be cursed.

Spoiler: It is. 

That tourism-squelching reputation is one Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys, in full Amity-Island-does-not-have-a-shark-problem mode) wants to dispel. After visitations by one lecherous sea hag, an unstoppable masked killer and a centuries-buried town founder popping out of his casket, Tom’s an unhappy believer. Not born on Widow’s Bay, he can leave the island. But his teenage son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) will die if he does … or so the story goes.  

Widow’s Bay wrong-foots viewers from the start, making you expect a familiar workplace comedy, a nor’eastern Parks and Recreation, say. (That was one of show creator Katie Dippold’s former gigs.) Tom’s town hall is filled with “quirky” types that prep you for a too-familiar ride: the doddering, forgetful secretary (K Callan); the chain-smoking slacker (Dale Dickey, who seems to have been born 70-years-old with a pack of Lucky Strikes in her tiny hands); the hapless fellow whose job is to look baffled (Somebody Somewhere’s great Jeff Hiller).

Then there’s Tom’s hyper-efficient assistant Patricia. She’s played by British actress Kate O’Flynn in a slow-burn performance of justifiable resentment from a lifetime of being underappreciated. Finally, the great Stephen Root plays Wyck, a full believer in his island’s dangers who’s always begging Mayor Tom to keep tourists away and “sound the siren” to put the island on lockdown.

Root is always great. O’Flynn, whose work I’d never seen before, is a revelation. Her Patricia is the town hall factotum, the sensible, sane one who gets things accomplished and no one appreciates. She still feels the claws of catty, former high school classmates who never believed she was almost one of the victims of the serial killer known as The Boogeyman.

The show’s biggest surprise is leading man Rhys. He was bone-chilling as a psychopath in Netflix’s recent The Beast in Me and may be best known as the earnest, murderous family man and Russian spy over six seasons of The Americans. Who knew he could be this funny? His Tom is a decent man who refuses to admit he’s standing in a cauldron, and the water around him is starting to bubble.

The equivalent of a big, spooky summer read with some drily laugh-out-loud twists, Widow’s Bay ends on an unresolved note that will be answered, I hope, with more seasons. It needs them, if only to give its fierce backbench of character actors (specifically Dickey and Hiller) more to add to the show’s comic monster mayhem.

NETFLIX

The monsters on the island of Lord of the Flies are completely human, prepubescent and with the angelic faces of the boys’ choir some of them belonged to before their plane crashed and stranded them in the middle of tropical nowhere. Based on the 1954 William Golding book that almost every schoolkid was assigned in the late 20^th century, it’s an unnervingly plausible examination of what might happen to “civilization” under extreme circumstances.

Each of the four episodes, directed by Marc Munden, focuses on one of the dozens of castaways. There’s Piggy (David McKenna), the chubby, bespectacled one who emphasizes logic, communication and teamwork. Ralph (Winston Sawyers) is the all-around likable chap nominated by the other boys to lead them. Jack (Lox Pratt) is the blond, privileged brat who covers his own fear with bullying and manipulation. Finally, Simon (Ike Talbut) is a mystical, fragile fellow torn between the Jack/Ralph camps. Two of these kids are doomed.  

The young actors’ performances are uneven, though a standout is Pratt. One look at him and you think, “What a good Draco Malfoy he’d make.” Sure enough, he’ll play the Aryan stinker in the upcoming HBO redo of the fantasy series. Incidentally, Lord of the Flies adapter Jack Thorne also wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for Broadway, and he co-created Netflix’s Adolescence. He’s good with kids, whether magical or, in this case, murderously all-too-human. At its best, this version of Flies takes some big, weird swings in tone and imagery. It recalls the 1970s film freakouts of directors like Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now, Walkabout) or Ken Russell (Altered States). Take that as a recommendation — or a warning.  

On the other end of the age range, Netflix’s The Boroughs puts older actors through some Stranger Things-style shenanigans. (The Duffer Brothers, makers of that now-departed, Atlanta-shot show, are producers.) I wish the new series deserved a cast that boasts Alfred Molina, Clarke Peters, Alfre Woodard, Geena Davis and comparative youngster Denis O’Hare. Oh, it’s not terrible. It’s watchable but lazy and patronizing in its “aren’t-geezers-adorable” POV. Don’t come here looking for any interesting observations about aging in America.

Molina plays Sam, a recent widower who moves into an elder community, The Boroughs, located in the desert and run in corporate style by shiny young couple Blaine and Anneliese Shaw, who all but wear “big bad” on their name tags. A grieving, aloof engineer, Sam initially resists the welcome of other residents, played by the previously mentioned actors, and especially the friendly approach of next-door-neighbor and ladies’ man Jack (Bill Pullman).

But when something happens to Jack, Sam joins forces with the others in a quest to subdue the spidery-reptile creatures that scuttle up through tunnels under their homes and drain the residents’ life force at night, like modern succubi. Sam and company have to battle not only these beasties but also evil Blaine and Anneliese, using, um, old television sets.

Boroughs, like Stranger Things, is an homage to Steven Spielberg in his 1980s era. The show knows how to put familiar elements in place but not how to sell them or do what Spielberg does so effortlessly: excite, tickle, scare or awe us. It’s a CliffsNotes version of CliffsNotes. The first episode even features, briefly, Dee Wallace, the weary single mom from E.T. And John Paesano’s score nudges so persistently at his greatest hits, Spielberg’s longtime composer John Williams has grounds to sue. Nostalgia shouldn’t be this spoon-fed and narratively sloppy. But, hey, these good actors are getting paychecks. Yay?

APPLE TV+

Meanwhile, Apple is having a good summer. Widow’s Bay winds up on June 17. Meanwhile, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed continues weekly through July 15.

Like Apple TV’s recent Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the new show hinges on the internet sex-cam trade. In this case, frazzled New York mom Paula (Tatiana Maslany) copes with her recent divorce from Karl (Jake Johnson) through casual screen sessions with cam boy Trevor (Brandon Flynn). It’s partly digital sex, but mainly Paula leans on Trevor as a sounding board and pressure valve as she negotiates her job at a trendy online mag and her contentious custody battle with Karl over their daughter. Then, Trevor winds up dead, Paula is implicated and things get dangerous with the arrival of a smiling murderer, beautifully played by Murray Bartlett.

I’ll write more about the show next time; it sticks the landing through the end, and Maslany keeps you watching … even though you’ll want to yell at the screen every time she makes a new risky decision that doesn’t involve the detective assigned to the murder investigation, played by the terrific Dolly de Leon.

Also, the latest version of Cape Fear, shot in Atlanta and Savannah, is riveting so far. Does it need 10 hour-long episodes for a story that has been made twice as stand-alone movies? We’ll see. But the cast — Amy Adams, Patrick Wilson and the great Javier Bardem as murderous Max Cady — is outstanding.  

ODDS AND ENDS

Fond farewell to: Hacks. I’d love to say HBO Max’s Hacks had a perfect, five-year arc. In the case of its leads, Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, that’s true. They were a perfect team, playing stand-up legend Deborah Vance and her Zillennial writing partner Ava. The show around them had its weak spots. I could have done without all the self-indulgent scenes producer Paul W. Downs gave himself playing Deborah’s manager. Those bits were made a lot worse by Megan Stalter, bellowing her way through her scenes as his nepo baby assistant. Excluding those lapses, Hacks was a gorgeous, funny-smart tribute to a cross-generational friendship.

Good riddance to: Half Man, also on HBO Max. This Richard Gadd follow-up to his popular trauma bomb Baby Reindeer notched up the toxic in its tale of two awful, stupid men. I gave the show the benefit of the doubt up until the halfway point, hoping we would get a switch of viewpoint that challenged the one-sided saga of a sexually insecure Glasgow lad named Niall (played by Mitchell Robertson and Jamie Bell as older and younger versions) and his vicious adoptive brother Ruben (Stuart Campbell and Gadd himself). The show was ponderous, obvious and felt more like 12 hours than six as it dramatized brutal, destructive, endlessly repetitive male behavior in the false belief that it was interrogating that behavior. No. It just perpetuated it. Here’s hoping Gadd steps off the lucrative trauma train for his next project.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous columns here.