Apple TV is riding one of its biggest breakout waves yet — and execs are ready to expand its universe. “Everyone’s moving as fast as we can,” says showrunner Katie Dippold.
Photo: Apple TV
It didn’t take long for Damon Lindelof’s relationship with Widow’s Bay to evolve from appreciation to love to straight-up infatuation. By episode two of the Apple TV series, the Lost and Leftovers showrunner says he “was talking about the show so obsessively” that he told the writers on his upcoming HBO drama The Chain that they “had to watch it in order to understand me” — and then made them sit through a “15-minute dissertation on the brilliance” of a single scene. “This show’s ability to seamlessly leap from horror to comedy to emotion is so exquisite, I want to punch myself in the face,” he says. Lindelof is not alone in his admiration: Widow’s Bay has become the year’s word-of-mouth smash, with growing viewership, intense social-media chatter, and serious awards-season buzz.
Like so many non-franchise shows in the streaming era, there wasn’t a ton of fanfare when Widow’s Bay debuted in late April. It’s not that Apple TV didn’t do any traditional TV advertising for creator Katie Dippold’s show — it absolutely did — but it wasn’t the kind of splashy, pricey push we’ve seen for a star-driven IP-based title, such as the platform’s new remake of Cape Fear. Instead, Apple leaned into the overwhelmingly rapturous reviews for Widow’s Bay, from both professional critics and taste-making celebrities such as Lindelof, Guillermo del Toro, and Severance director-producer Ben Stiller, and used those early evangelists (and more recent converts such as game designer Hideo Kojima) to help sell audiences on a series whose tone isn’t easy to capture in a 15-second TV ad.
The strategy has worked: While Apple doesn’t give out specific viewership numbers for shows, the company tells Vulture that Widow’s Bay has tripled its launch-week viewership, with its global audience growing an average of 20 percent every week since launch. And according to social-media tracking firm Sprinklr, Widow’s Bay is Apple’s fastest-growing first-year series ever in terms of social engagement across major platforms and podcasts.
“It’s similar to a lot of our biggest successes,” Apple TV programming chief Matt Cherniss says of the internal and external buzz around the show, comparing the reaction to the Matthew Rhys–led series to the early acclaim for Ted Lasso and Severance. “Everyone at the moment wants to talk about the show, tell you they’re watching it, tell you how much they’re enjoying it,” Cherniss says. “That’s always a good sign.”
Dippold herself has been on the receiving end of ecstatically Lindelof-esque reactions from her industry colleagues, which she admits hasn’t always been the case. “I’ve done things where I’ve only heard from close friends. I’ve heard from a lot more people on this, which is really, really lovely,” she says. Laughing, Dippold adds, “It also makes me think, Oh, maybe people just didn’t like the thing before. It’s wonderful, you know. It just makes you wonder what’s been going on up until now.”
The longtime film and TV writer, who cut her teeth on Parks and Recreation 15 years ago and landed that gig in part with a very early draft of what would become Widow’s Bay, doesn’t have access to the deep ratings data Cherniss has, but she has also seen an explosion in enthusiasm online over the past six weeks. Shortly after Widow’s Bay premiered in late April, “I remember looking at Reddit and there were just a few people there,” she says. “I was like, Oh, that’s nice. You know, we got someone.”
But all that changed as word about the show’s audacious plot twists and meticulously constructed jokes began to spread and devoted fans started hashing out every small detail of the universe. “A couple of weeks ago, I looked back, and there were so many people, like 90,000 Residents,” she says, using the moniker Widow’s Bay fans had given themselves. “The way it jumped up blew my mind. I was really wowed at how many more people were in that space.” (As of this week, the population of r/WidowsBay is over 120,000.)
The tsunami of interest hasn’t been limited to just Hollywood insiders, TV nerds geeking out in chat rooms, or TikTokers sharing clips. There have been other hints that Widow’s Bay is breaking out in the broader pop culture, such as an anchor on CNBC’s Squawk Box randomly mentioning he was watching the show or Google’s decision to drop an Easter egg into search results for the words “Widow’s Bay” (something an Apple source says was not a paid promotion). And on Wednesday, outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a post to his 17 million followers on X letting them know all ten episodes of season one were now available to binge. While Cook obviously has an interest in hyping Apple products, as far as TV originals go, he has generally only publicly touted breakouts such as Ted Lasso and Severance. So even if the company isn’t putting out hard ratings numbers, Cook’s decision to post about the show can absolutely be read as a vote of confidence and another sign the company thinks it has a winner.
Apple TV’s support for Widow’s Bay dates back to the first moments the show was on the streamer’s radar: Cherniss bought Dippold and director Hiro Murai’s pitch immediately after he heard it, or, in industry parlance, “in the room.” This even though Dippold broke one of the cardinal rules for selling a project to execs. “Usually when you pitch something, you’re supposed to say, ‘This show is like this other successful show,’” she explains. “But I couldn’t think of a comparison for this. I talk about Atlanta and Barry a lot because they’re very cinematic comedy half-hours and really surprising and thrilling. But this isn’t quite like those. I couldn’t really say that in good faith, because I knew this would feel different than those.” So instead, Dippold says, “I just went in like a saleswoman — This is like nothing you’ve ever seen before! — and was just praying that would work.”
It did, and Cherniss now says that, in addition to a strong pilot script, the out-there nature of Widow’s Bay is what made him rush to give the project an automatic series order. “It’s different,” he says. “People oftentimes think that different is risky. I think doing things that everyone else is doing is what’s risky, right? And doing something different is what allows a show to break out.” And while Dippold “is obviously the vision behind the show,” Cherniss says Murai’s presence at the pitch also helped seal the deal. “One of the reasons why I was so confident in buying it in the room and ordering it to series was because Hiro was also there saying, ‘I want to do this as my next project.’”
Once Apple execs had the chance to see rough cuts of Dippold’s finished product, their next challenge was figuring out how to get audiences to come to a show that didn’t fit neatly into any conventional box. “When you have a show that feels different, you want a campaign that also feels a bit different and signals to the audience that this isn’t a straightforward horror show or a straightforward comedy,” Cherniss explains.
Photo: Apple TV
That meant doing things like releasing an early teaser trailer in which a fake representative for the town of Widow’s Bay spends an entire minute simply walking away from the viewer as 1980s-era smooth jazz played in the background, or having a press-tour panel where Rhys, Dippold, and Murai were moderated by actor-producer Neil Casey in character as Widow’s Bay innkeeper Kurt. “We tried so hard to do something that wasn’t campy or corny or on the nose, and the marketing and publicity teams have been completely working in that same spirit,” Dippold says. “I was worried that it was going to be an experience of having to argue so it doesn’t come off too broad, and that hasn’t been an issue at all. They’ve been wanting to lean into the mystique and the mystery, and I think that has paid off.”
While interest in Widow’s Bay has been growing consistently, the middle of the season may have been a turning point with audiences — in particular “Beach Reads,” the fourth episode of the show, when Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) throws a most unique cocktail party. “We collectively flipped from This is cool to This is next-level,” says superfan Lindelof, speaking for both himself and the writers of his upcoming project. “I can’t remember the last time I was as exhilarated as when Bechir says to Patricia, ‘What the fuck are you doing?,’ nor can I remember laughing harder than when she shouted, ‘You had qualms?!’ shortly thereafter.”
Dippold thinks there’s a good reason “Beach Reads” stands out. “The first three episodes have to lay a lot of groundwork for the entire series, and episode four lets you finally just go on a ride,” she says. “Four is a more visceral experience.” Yet despite the positive reaction now, at the time the episode was being plotted, “It felt like it was a risk, after all this setup, to do a departure episode of a character that we had no idea how the audience would be feeling about at that point,” Dippold says. But it paid off: “That episode feels like people really started to get onboard with what we were trying to do,” she says.
Apple TV is very much onboard, too, having already given Widow’s Bay a second-season order. The streamer has also been doing a full-court Emmy campaign, boosted last week when the series snagged five TV Critics Association Awards nominations, tied with Heated Rivalry and Industry for the most of any program this year. All told, it’s been a pretty spectacular and drama-free rollout for an idea that had been kicking around Hollywood for over 15 years.
“We skipped all the constant overthinking that always tends to destroy things,” Dippold says, crediting the decision by Cherniss and his bosses, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, to order Widow’s Bay directly to series with sparing her the “development hell” so common in the business. “Apple just let us make this crazy show and supported the hell out of it,” she says. “I hope this experience can happen to creative people more often in this town. It’s gotten very fear-based, but if you just let people take some big swings sometimes, it can do the business a lot more good.”
The next big challenge for Dippold, of course, is getting season two in order. It’s become commonplace to keep streaming viewers waiting two or three years between seasons, even with some comedies. The good news here for fans is that the Widow’s Bay showrunner is already at work on the next chapter of the series. While stressing that maintaining overall quality takes priority, “I want the show to come back as soon as possible,” she says, adding there’s “no reason for it to be more than two years” and could potentially be much sooner. She’s already started writing on the new season and says the show’s writers’ room “will start very soon,” with plans to go through until the end of the year. “Then we have to see how soon after we can start shooting,” she adds. “But everyone’s moving as fast as we can.”
Cherniss says that while neither he nor Dippold want to rush production, particularly at the expense of quality, “There is an advantage to bringing things back as quickly as you can. It keeps the momentum of the show up, keeps the excitement up, and it keeps it on the front burner for the audience,” he says. “So we’ll take it as soon as she can make it available to us.”
Even more intriguingly, Dippold says she has also started thinking about possibly expanding the world of Widow’s Bay beyond the series. “If people are leaning into this place, then you could potentially do other stories down the road of what has happened in the past,” she says. She notes that when she was on Parks and Rec, the writers would sometimes take what seemed to be a throwaway joke in an episode and then circle back to it months later and build an entire episode around it. In the same way, Dippold thinks a reference to “the ridiculous past that Widow’s Bay has” could be turned into either a stand-alone episode or a short six-episode miniseries: “Creatively, that sounds very fun to do.” Apple is game. “Katie’s spoken about this being a universe as much as a show,” Cherniss says. “So the more stories she has to tell with these characters and this world and this tone, the better.”
All of this will likely come as good news to fans like Damon Lindelof, who, when Vulture asked if he might be willing to email us a sentence or two about Widow’s Bay, sent over 400 words of praise, including a note of appreciation that we were writing about it. “So glad you’re giving this show its flowers,” he wrote. “It deserves bouquets.”