Shows Like
Shows Like Widow's Bay: Horror-Comedy With a Mean Streak
By Jordan A. · · 6 min read
The best running joke in Widow's Bay is that Mayor Tom Loftis knows. He knows the island is wrong. He knows the tourists are, functionally, bait. And he keeps approving the ferry schedule anyway, because the alternative is admitting his town has no future that doesn't involve somebody's cousin disappearing off the breakwater.
Apple TV dropped the show in April, it ran ten episodes through mid-June, and then in July it collected 19 Emmy nominations, more than any other new series this year. That's a ridiculous haul for a horror-comedy, a genre the Television Academy normally treats like a rumor. If you finished it and now have a very specific hole in your week, these are the shows that fill it.
What Widow's Bay is actually doing
Katie Dippold created it. Hiro Murai directed the pilot. Between them they landed a tone that shouldn't survive contact with a script: municipal budget comedy stacked on top of real, hair-lifting dread. Engadget described the pitch as what would happen if the mayor from Jaws tried to turn his dangerous, haunted island into the next Martha's Vineyard, and that's the whole engine. Tom isn't evil. He's a guy with a mortgage and a dying tax base who has decided the monster is a marketing problem.
Matthew Rhys plays him with that sweaty, apologetic charm he's been perfecting for fifteen years, and he's nominated for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series against Jason Segel and Martin Short. Kate O'Flynn, as his assistant Patricia, got a supporting nod for what is essentially a final girl who also has to take meeting minutes. The whole thing is on The Hollywood Reporter's nominations breakdown if you want the full 19.
Horror-comedy that stays funny
What We Do in the Shadows is the gold standard and the closest match for the joke rhythm. Six seasons of vampires on Staten Island failing at basic errands. The horror is real, the stakes are petty, and the show never once winks at you about it. People will tell you it takes a few episodes to click. It does. Give it four.
Los Espookys only got two seasons on HBO and it remains one of the strangest, funniest things that network has ever aired. A group of friends in an unnamed Latin American country stage horror scenarios for paying clients. Deadpan to the point of absurdity, and gorgeous to look at, which is the other half of the Widow's Bay appeal.
Santa Clarita Diet is Drew Barrymore as a suburban realtor who becomes undead and keeps selling houses. Netflix cancelled it after three seasons on a cliffhanger, which still annoys me. The comedy of a local professional managing a supernatural crisis with a spreadsheet is pure Tom Loftis.
Evil spent four seasons on a case-of-the-week about a Catholic assessor team investigating miracles, and it's funnier and scarier than that sounds. Michael Emerson is playing one of the great TV villains.
Small towns with something in the water
Deadloch is the one I push hardest on people, because most Americans still haven't found it. An Australian comedy-crime series about a queer feminist arts festival in a Tasmanian town where men keep washing up dead. The dialogue is filthy and precise, the mystery is a real mystery, and the tonal balance is nearly identical to what Dippold pulls off.
Bodkin puts American podcasters in a coastal Irish village to investigate a decades-old disappearance, and the village is not delighted about it. Will Forte does the wounded-idiot thing better than anyone alive. Slighter than Widow's Bay, but the local-hostility comedy is a direct match.
Fargo is the grandparent of all of this. Every season is a fresh cast in a snowbound town where ordinary greed summons something enormous. Season one and season two are the best. Season three has Ewan McGregor playing two brothers and a bowling alley scene that will confuse you productively.
Resident Alien has Alan Tudyk as a stranded extraterrestrial impersonating a small-town Colorado doctor. Broader and sillier than Widow's Bay, and completely charming with it. When you want the town-meeting comedy without the dread, this is the one.
Mare of Easttown has no jokes to speak of, but The Guardian's five-star review of Widow's Bay called it Mare of Easttown crossed with Schitt's Creek, and once you hear that you can't unhear it. Same suffocating civic intimacy. Same sense that everyone at the diner already knows.
Twin Peaks is where the whole genre comes from. Do the first season, then decide about the rest. Widow's Bay owes it the fog, the town council, and the idea that a place can hold a grudge.
If you're here for Hiro Murai's eye
Atlanta is the main event. Murai directed most of the best episodes, including "Teddy Perkins," which is a horror short film wearing a sitcom's clothes and one of the scariest things ever broadcast on FX. Four seasons, no filler, and the third one goes to Europe and gets weird.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Prime Video reunites him with Donald Glover for a spy series that's really a marriage series. It's funnier and sadder than the movie it's named after, and the camera does that Murai thing where a room feels slightly too still.
If you're here for Matthew Rhys
The Americans is his masterpiece. Six seasons of Soviet spies in suburban Washington destroying their own family in slow motion, and the final season is close to perfect.
Perry Mason on HBO gives you Rhys as a drunk, ruined LA investigator in 1932, shot like a noir that can't afford lightbulbs. Two seasons, both good, cancelled too early.
He's also opposite Claire Danes in Netflix's The Beast in Me, which is a completely different register: no jokes, all menace. Rhys got Emmy nominations this year in both comedy and limited series categories, which is a strange and excellent flex.
Where to watch, and what's next
Widow's Bay lives on Apple TV, as do most of that platform's Emmy contenders. Apple's newsroom says it landed a record 89 nominations across its slate this year, though the trades counted 87; either way, Widow's Bay was the biggest single contributor. What We Do in the Shadows and Fargo are on Hulu, Deadloch and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are on Prime Video, Bodkin and Santa Clarita Diet are on Netflix, and Mare of Easttown, Los Espookys and Perry Mason are on HBO Max. Apple renewed the show for season two back in June, before the finale even aired, so the island will be open for business again.
If you want more in this lane, our guide to the best Apple TV shows of 2026 has the rest of that catalogue, and shows like Only Murders in the Building covers the funny-mystery side. For the pure fright picks, try the best horror shows of 2026.
Twelve options is a lot to hold in your head at 11pm. Tell BingeNext's TV recommendation engine that you loved Widow's Bay, add one more show you're into, and it'll rank what's actually available on the services you pay for. It's also on your phone via the iPhone app, which is where most people end up using it anyway.
Topics covered: widows bay, apple tv plus, horror comedy, matthew rhys, emmys 2026
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.