Should Widow's Bay Beat Hacks?
The 78th Primetime Emmys are handed out on Monday night, September 14, live on NBC at 8 p.m. Eastern and streaming on Peacock, with Mariska Hargitay hosting from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Eight shows are up for Outstanding Comedy Series, and the Associated Press's Andrew Dalton boiled the race down to two. Hacks led all comedies with a record 24 nominations for its fifth and final season. Widow's Bay, a first-year horror comedy from Apple TV, arrived with 19 and turned eight of them into trophies at the Creative Arts Emmys on September 5 and 6.
You might be reading this before the envelope opens or the morning after. Our answer is the same either way: Widow's Bay should win. And whatever the Academy decides, all ten episodes are streaming, which makes it the best thing you can do with your weekend.
Hacks earned its applause
Take the case for the farewell seriously. Jean Smart plays Deborah Vance, a legendary Las Vegas stand-up reinventing her aging act to hold on to her casino residency, opposite Hannah Einbinder as Ava Daniels. The final ten episodes ran from April 9 to May 28 and sit at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, whose critics' consensus says Hacks "takes a triumphant bow." TheWrap's Steve Pond singled out Einbinder's "deeply moving (and very funny) performance in the series finale."
Dalton sized up Smart's chances plainly: "The Emmys loves to give golden send-offs to outgoing shows, and it will be stunning if Jean Smart doesn't win best actress in a comedy for playing stand-up comic Deborah Vance, as she did for all four previous seasons."
That sentence is the best argument for Widow's Bay. If Dalton is right, the send-off Hacks deserves arrives through Smart, whose Deborah Vance is what people will remember about this show in twenty years. Hacks has also won Outstanding Comedy Series before, for its third season. The farewell does not need the big trophy to count.
Why the trophy belongs to Widow's Bay
The series award should go to the comedy that tried the hardest thing this year and pulled it off. Created by Katie Dippold, Widow's Bay casts Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, the mainland-born mayor of a New England island who wants to bring tourists to a sleepy town that happens to carry a centuries-old curse. Horror needs you tense and comedy needs you loose, and most shows that try both pick one and decorate with the other. Widow's Bay plays both straight. It holds 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the critics' consensus credits it with "bringing scares, laughs, and a game cast."
The episode titles carry the joke and the dread at once: "Welcome to Widow's Bay," "Lodging," "Beach Reads," "Your Baggage," "Emergency Shelter," and the finale, "We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!" The season reads like a tourist brochure for a place you should not visit. Hiro Murai directed five of the ten, including the first three and the last two, and Ti West directed the sixth, "Our History."
A horror comedy lives or dies by its cast. Pond credits Rhys with "the way he keeps the horror humorous." Around him are Kate O'Flynn as Patricia Moyer, the mayor's eccentric assistant, Dale Dickey as Rosemary from the mayor's office, and Stephen Root as Wyck Crawford, an outspoken believer in the town's supernatural history. Dalton wrote that O'Flynn "wowed with a breakout performance in the debut season," and she and Dickey are both nominated for supporting actress, in the same race as Einbinder. Betty Gilpin, who plays Sarah Westcott Warren, wife of the town's founder, has already won guest actress in a comedy.
That was one of Widow's Bay's eight Creative Arts wins. The other seven: casting for a comedy series, half-hour cinematography, half-hour production design, original dramatic score, music supervision, and both half-hour sound categories, editing and mixing. Hacks was not shut out, since its finale took single-camera comedy picture editing. But the people who judge how television is made went through Widow's Bay category by category and kept choosing it.
Pond predicts a Widow's Bay win, and recent history backs a newcomer: "overall, freshman shows have won in three of the last five years after only winning once in the previous decade." Our call on the comedy race:
- Will win (our prediction): Widow's Bay, by a nose.
- Should win (our vote): Widow's Bay, by a lot more than that.
If Hacks wins, nobody has been robbed. A great show will have been thanked for being great. Rhys, who won lead actor in a drama in 2018 for The Americans, is nominated in comedy this time, and Pond points out that over the last decade, every Outstanding Comedy Series winner's lead actor or actress has won too. He sees "absolutely no reason to think" Rhys won't keep that streak going.
Drama: we split our ballot
The Pitt went into last year's ceremony with 13 nominations and won Outstanding Drama Series anyway. This year, Pond writes, "it reinforced its status as voters' favorite by leading all shows with 25 nominations." Each episode covers roughly one hour of a single emergency-room shift in real time, and the second season ran 15 of them between January 8 and April 16. Noah Wyle, who won lead actor last year as Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, is nominated again. It is a superb machine, and season two ran it beautifully.
Pluribus is the one we would vote for. Vince Gilligan's nine-episode Apple TV series follows Carol Sturka, a novelist left isolated when an alien virus turns the rest of humanity into a peaceful, contented hive mind that she alone is immune to. It holds 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it rests almost entirely on one performance.
Dalton expects voters to hand Rhea Seehorn, the former Better Call Saul star, her first Emmy after four nominations, and she deserves it. We would go further than the acting prize. The Pitt's second season perfected a format its first season invented, and Pluribus had to invent one from scratch in nine episodes. Our rule is the same in both races: when the new show is this good, it should beat the returning champion.
Your weekend, whatever the envelope says
Widow's Bay premiered with two episodes on April 29 and finished on June 17, so the whole first season is waiting on Apple TV: ten episodes, one good weekend. Lucy Mangan called it "an absolute blast" in The Guardian, and Apple renewed it for a second season in June, so you are not starting something that stops dead.
If the Emmys send you looking for more, start with these nominees, in this order.
Widow's Bay's cousins
Finished the island and want more strange town with a straight face? Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost's 1990 FBI murder mystery in a small Washington town, is the grandparent of every weird-town show with jokes in it. Northern Exposure spends 110 episodes with the eccentric residents of Cicely, Alaska, and has the civic warmth Widow's Bay keeps threatening to curse. Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan's seven-episode miniseries about the fishing village of Crockett Island, is the same island dread without the jokes, and Hamish Linklater, its new priest, plays Widow's Bay's founder in flashbacks. What We Do in the Shadows, six seasons of vampire roommates on Staten Island, is the purest horror comedy of the lot.
Or follow the people. Hiro Murai directed and executive produced Atlanta, and the unease he brings to Widow's Bay is right there in that show's strangest hours. If Rhys is why you came, The Americans, the FX Cold War spy drama he led opposite Keri Russell, won him his Emmy.
