New Horror Series With Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score Explodes on Streaming
Apple TV+ has a habit of quietly releasing something great while everyone is looking elsewhere, and its latest show seems to be doing exactly that.
Widow’s Bay, a horror-comedy series that just premiered on the platform, has landed with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 36 reviews, earning itself a Certified Fresh distinction right out of the gate. According to Comicbook, the show is also starting to climb the charts, which is an encouraging sign for a brand new series in its first week.
The show was created by Katie Dippold, who previously wrote The Heat and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. It is set in a fictional New England island town called Widow’s Bay, a place with a dark and grim history that the show leans into fully. The series blends genuine horror with comedy, and the result sounds like something that will appeal especially to fans of Stephen King. Comicbook notes that the second episode alone combines a ghost-filled old hotel with a killer clown, so the show is clearly not holding back on its genre ambitions.
Matthew Rhys leads the cast as the town’s mayor, a man desperately trying to rebrand Widow’s Bay as a tourist destination while ignoring the terrifying things happening around him. He is joined by a deep bench of recognizable character actors including Stephen Root and Toby Huss from King of the Hill, Tim Baltz from The Righteous Gemstones, Kevin Carroll from The Walking Dead, and Connor Ratliff from The George Lucas Talk Show.
On the charts, Widow’s Bay started at number nine on Apple TV+ when it first dropped, but has since climbed to the number four spot and held that position for two days in a row, according to Flix Patrol, which tracks streaming platform rankings. That kind of upward movement in the opening week is a good sign. The shows currently sitting above it, including the number one series Your Friends & Neighbors, have been on the platform for months and have much larger episode libraries pulling viewers in. Widow’s Bay still has eight more episodes to come over the rest of the summer, so there is plenty of runway left for it to keep rising.
The premiere of Widow’s Bay also fits into a broader story about what Apple TV+ has been building lately. Comicbook points out that the streamer has been on a solid run recently, with new seasons of Your Friends & Neighbors and For All Mankind both landing in the past month alongside the premiere of Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Apple TV+ has long had a reputation for leaning heavily into prestige sci-fi, but Widow’s Bay is a sign that the platform is comfortable branching out into other genres when the right project comes along.
A perfect critical score and a growing audience in week one is about as good a start as any new show could hope for. If the remaining episodes hold up, Widow’s Bay could end up being one of the more talked-about shows of the summer.
Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!
