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On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
If there is a skeleton key to unlocking the unpredictable and unexpected charms of “Widow’s Bay,” it’s that photo from 2016. You know the one: writer (and eventual series creator) Katie Dippold is seated at a Halloween party in full “Babadook” finery, staring at the camera with a wry smile, hilariously out of place. Her caption is even better: “Tbt to Halloween when I dressed as the babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown ups drinking wine vibe.”
As the Apple TV series — a scary haunted island story that’s also incredibly funny, with a rich lore, a totally stacked cast, terrifying monsters, visual gags galore, and the kind of delight that’s hard to fake — has rolled out over the past few weeks on the streamer, audiences have continued to warm to it. And when they find out it’s Dippold behind it, the “Babadook” Halloween lady?
“It makes me so happy,” Dippold said with a laugh when asked by IndieWire about the photo’s continued resonance. “I’ve seen a bunch of comments of people like, ‘Oh, this makes sense,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, good,’ because I feel like that photo is a real glimpse into my soul, and this show is all of my sensibilities and loves and dreams in one project. It makes sense to me.”
At this season’s edition of IndieWire Honors, series creator/executive producer/showrunner/writer Dippold shares our Visionary Award along with series director and executive producer Hiro Murai, a double-shot of comedic genius that also exemplifies the unique charms of “Widow’s Bay.” Both long-time comedy writers and creators — Dippold came up through “MADtv” and “Parks and Recreation” before turning to film with features like “The Heat” and 2016’s “Ghostbusters,” while Murai is best known for his work on shows like “Atlanta,” “Legion,” and “Barry” — the duo’s seemingly divergent sensibilities blend beautifully into the special stew of the scary, funny, and scary funny series.
The response alone has felt different to Dippold and Murai, who are basking in glowing reviews from both critics and audiences as the series’ first (we hope of many!) season closes out on the streaming platform.
‘Widow’s Bay’“It feels different,” Dippold said. “I’ve had some real highs and lows in this business. Someone said something once that always stuck with me, that the hits are between the misses. I always loved that. I definitely have heard from more people than I ever have in my entire life, times a thousand.”
Added Murai, “You just never know when you make something, whether it’s going to resonate with people, especially when you’re trying to do something a little bit left to center.”
The success of “Widow’s Bay” has been long in the making. It doesn’t just date back to when they sold the show to Apple in 2024, or when Dippold first imagined the story as a “Parks and Rec” spec script almost 20 years ago, but all the way back to Dippold’s childhood in New Jersey.
“It’s been a very, very long journey,” she said. “In the very beginning, it came from when I was a kid. I used to love writing. I mean, it wasn’t good, I would just write newspaper stories all the time about my sister, taking her down. But every summer we would go to the Long Branch [New Jersey] boardwalk, and there was a haunted house that was very questionable.”
Dippold is clear: It was very questionable. “It was the ’80s, they would chase you around, this is when they could grab you,” she said. “Halloween and horror events were really big in my family, and I loved it so much, and so I’d be so giddy going through this haunted house. I didn’t know if I was going to laugh or scream. That feeling has been something I’ve been trying to capture my whole life, and I’ve always wanted to see it on screen.”
That was one of the first things Dippold told Murai about, too, that feeling. “I think the first thing she told me [about the tone she wanted for the show] was her memory of going to this haunted house on the pier in New Jersey and that sense of anxiety and anticipation, but the fun kind, the giddiness,” he said. “That felt like such a fun thing to tap into, and I haven’t really seen anything, especially on TV, that plays with that.”
In its earliest incarnation, Dippold imagined “Widow’s Bay” as a spec script for “Parks and Rec,” something “more comedic” that could slot into the hit NBC series. “But I knew I wouldn’t watch that version of the show because I really want to feel scared,” Dippold said. “I want to feel like this is a real place. I want to be immersed. I am a comedy writer, but I love horror movies first and foremost, and that was the hardest thing. The humor in the show can come from character and also really playing the truth of the scene, and you can fall off the rails very easily. You really have to think about, how would someone react to this? It took years and years of trial and error to really think about how could that person react in a way that’s real, but is also still fun and human.”
‘Widow’s Bay’For years, Dippold said she “put a hold” on trying to do anything with that old “Parks and Rec” script, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. “This was the thing I would always work on,” she said. “Sometimes, and this is ridiculous, but I would go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and I would walk through the museum, and I would look at the display cases, and I would imagine what the Widow’s Bay version of those cases would be. That, weirdly, opened things up for me.”
Also helpful? “Atlanta.” Donald Glover’s FX series, which Murai produced and directed, still ranks as one of Dippold’s favorite shows. When she was still hammering away at what would become “Widow’s Bay,” it — and Murai’s work on it — helped Dippold imagine what her show could be like.
“We don’t come from the same kind of comedy community. I came up in the Mike Schur/Greg Daniels world, and he’s doing ‘Atlanta’ and all sorts of different things,” Dippold said. “Watching ‘Atlanta’ was really helpful, because TV really changed a ton, and they were doing such cool things. Like, just to do one episode like ‘Alligator Man,’ which is one of my favorite episodes of television, and then to do something like ‘Woods.’ They would go in different directions, and I really, really wanted to do something like that for this, because I wanted this to feel like the tonal changes are intentional. I wanted it to feel surprising, like a rollercoaster.”
As “Widow’s Bay” began to take shape, Dippold started looking for a series director. Her first choice was an easy one. (Murai went on to direct five of the series’ 10 episodes, including its pilot and finale.) Like “Atlanta,” the first season includes a wide variety of episodes that knit together beautifully, from a flashback episode starring Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater to an eye-popping drug trip helmed by “Friendship” director Andrew DeYoung.
‘Widow’s Bay’“Hiro was my dream director for this,” Dippold said. “I think he’s brilliant, and he’s very surprising, and I knew he would never let this be corny. He’s amazing at creating an atmosphere, and it being grounded. We were really on the same page of wanting this to feel cozy. It’s like ‘Jaws’ in the beginning, what a cozy place to be. Most of my favorite horror movies do start off that way, like you want to be there before it gets bad.”
Dippold sent Murai a script in early 2024 (the show was sold later that year). “And this is what I really love about Hiro: This is a very easy pilot to say no to, someone tells you, ‘Oh, it’s about a haunted island’? That sounds terrible!” Dippold said. “That really is a risky thing. And he still met with me, and then I told him about the season and where it’s going to go, and he was in. And again, he didn’t really know me. I didn’t really know him. I just knew he was brilliant, and I love that he is a risk-taker.”
“When I first read it, to be honest, my instinct was like, ‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’” Murai recalled. “On paper, I could see a couple of different versions of it, and some of them were out of my vocabulary a little bit. But then when I spoke to Katie, her focus was so much on giving you this sense of grounded reality where the comedy and the horror can sit on top of each other, rather than it being a strictly comedy-forward language, and that kind of reframed it for me.”
But that wily combination of funny and scary — the “Babadook” Halloween photo of it all — clarified things.
“As we started talking, I realized that we had the same sort of theory about how comedy and horror play with each other, and it’s all about kind of building tension and then not showing your hand on whether you’re going to puncture it as a horror moment or a comedy moment,” he said. “That conceptual idea got really exciting for me. It’s like, oh, people are really not going to know whether it’s going to be scary or funny at any given moment, just because of the language of the show.”
When the pair took it to Apple, the streamer bought the pitch in the room, “a very rare Hollywood experience” that was new to Dippold. “I’ve been having a tough time [in show business], and I was like, ‘You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to take a really big creative swing and see what happens. This is the thing I’ve always wanted to do, and I don’t know how people are going to respond to it,’” Dippold said. “All you can do is make the thing you’ve always wanted to make and work like crazy on it and put it out there, and you cannot possibly predict if people are going to take to it or not. So I accepted that, and I was ready for that. And even though I was very proud of it, I still had no idea how it was going to land.”
‘Widow’s Bay’Once the writers’ room opened, Dippold said that it was an “exciting but terrifying time, because … with TV, you’re building the plane while it’s still in the air.” Having Murai in her corner, someone she could trust “with really great taste,” made everything feel possible. And fun.
“We talked about things conceptually as we were prepping,” Murai said. “There’s a lot of things that you have to kind of do beforehand on this show, like designing props and a lot of sight gags that need to land in a very specific way. We spent a good chunk of time talking about those board games that show up in Episode 2.” (If you know, you know.)
Also easier with a partner? Casting.
“One of the harder parts was casting; it was one of the scarier times, because it just wasn’t going to work until you found the person that it worked with,” Dippold said. “I never had specific actors in mind for the parts, because most of it was taking pieces of people from real life and putting them into characters.”
The series stars Matthew Rhys as the town’s beleaguered mayor, Tom Loftis, a Widow’s Bay transplant desperate to turn the island into the next Martha’s Vineyard, even as it becomes increasingly clear that the New England enclave is really not hospitable to, well, most people. (It’s haunted, OK?!) Rhys is joined by a murderer’s row of character actors, including Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, Dale Dickey, Kevin Carroll, Jeff Hiller, Neil Casey, and more.
“I’ve heard someone describe the show as the Avengers of character actors,” Murai said. “I think that’s very fair. When we first started casting the show, we were looking for something really specific. If you brought a comedy-only person onto the show, your expectations out of the show would be a certain thing. If you brought a purely drama person, again, it becomes more of a horror thing. It’s really hard to find people who can play both, who can play absurdity in a real way. Once we got Matthew, Stephen, and Kate, it just made sense that that was kind of the register that we wanted to be in, that this should be all kinds of people who can sit in the reality of this very strange place and also know what’s funny.”
Casting Tom was the hardest ask, Dippold admitted, “Because there’s a lot of comedic actors that are so funny and good actors, but I just don’t know that I would’ve watched the show,” she said. “You know what I mean? I want to feel like the show’s taking it seriously. We met with so many different people, and [casting director] Allison Jones is amazing, and she just always has wonderful ideas. I’ve always loved Matthew Rhys. I love ‘The Americans’ so much. I think he’s one of the best actors of all time. And so he came up, and to be honest, as much as I loved him, it was hard for me to imagine him doing this.”
And then they got on Zoom.
“He was just so lovely and so naturally funny, and he just seemed to get it,” Dippold said. “Usually after a meeting, you either have a good feeling or a bad feeling, and I just had the best feeling, and then I called Hiro, and he also had the best feeling, and we’re like, ‘Well, I guess let’s do that.’ It’s one of those things that I feel the most lucky about because I can’t imagine this show without him. I just feel like he’s so that part, and he just plays the truth of it. He never goes for the joke. He’s so funny, but he’s so funny that he knows not to try to be funny.”
‘Widow’s Bay’In a supporting cast filled with favorites, O’Flynn also stands out. When casting director Jones sent Dippold and Murai one of O’Flynn’s tapes, it instantly changed how they felt about the character. “To be honest, it wasn’t what I pictured at all,” Dippold said. “I think a big part of the job is [that] you need to open yourself to all sorts of different ideas, but she just was Patricia. I’m like, ‘Oh, OK. Well, that’s Patricia.’ It’s not what I thought, but she is Patricia.”
Murai laughed. “We all collectively had that same reaction where we were watching tapes, and there were so many good actors playing a version of Patricia,” he said. “But when Kate sent us the tape, it was this maybe even weirder version of Patricia. ‘Oh, you’ve lived on a haunted island for your entire life.’ It was one of those things where that’s not what’s on the page necessarily, but this feels like lightning in the bottle. It feels like it has to be her. Katie, to her infinite credit, was like, that is not what I’ve been thinking about all these years, but I can’t deny that this person is incredibly special and this choice she’s made is sort of perfect for the show.”
That sort of easy back-and-forth exemplifies Dippold and Murai’s working relationship. Dippold might have been living with the dream of “Widow’s Bay” for almost two decades, but she’s not at all precious about making her vision a shared one.
“Especially when we first started filming, we were still trying to find the tone and the actors were still trying to find their characters, do there’s just a lot of things where we just tried it until it felt right,” Murai said. “We’d try something, and then we look at each other, ‘Does that feel? Is that right?’ And then we just adjust accordingly.”
Dippold seems to have brought that same spirit to the writers’ room as well. When it came to mapping the season, she was eager to hear everyone’s ideas of how to make this wacky world a reality. Yes, she knew where it was going to end (and no spoilers here), but she was open to any and all roads that got them there.
‘Widow’s Bay’“I knew what was going to happen in the finale, but it wasn’t down to every detail,” she said. “I knew the final dilemma that was going to come up, and I wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to play out. That was actually a very fun time in the room, debating that, and you’ll know what I mean when you see it. But I knew where we’re going, I knew the character arcs, and I knew the journeys, but how we got there, the fun we were going to have along the way, was different. It was a wonderful, wonderful group of writers with different kinds of brains, and everyone added something that was crucial to the season.”
Still, Dippold can easily recall some of the elements she knew she wanted from the start: that we’d first be introduced to the town under fog, that there would be a “spooky old inn” on the island, that Loftis would pick up a hitchhiker at some point.
“I think you have to go in knowing exactly what you want to do and knowing how you want it to feel,” she said. “So then you can navigate the conversation, and when someone pitches the perfect joke, you know, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what this show needs.’ Or someone has a great idea for a twist, you’re like, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ So I think you have to go in knowing, but then try to get as much as you can out of these wonderful brains.”
And getting all that stuff onto the screen now. Asked about pacing out the show into 10 wonderfully realized episodes, Murai pointed to Dippold’s long-gestating vision as being the real lighthouse here. It’s not about saving good stuff for a potential later season; it’s about delighting in what’s possible after all this time.
“I always think you just lean towards the fun or what feels exciting to you, and so once you start thinking about it like, ‘Oh, I should save this for another season,’ you’re not really being honest with yourself about what’s fun about the show,” Murai said. “When I look at the season now, I feel like, ‘Oh, this is a show made by somebody who’s been thinking about this for a long time and has really specific interests within this world.’ And you can tell they’re all bangers because it’s been living with her for a really long time.”
The duo played coy when asked about a second season — “fingers crossed,” Dippold noted — but they both admitted there’s plenty more to play with. “I feel like there’s just so much, the whole show is the ensemble, and there’s so many characters that I would love to see more of,” Murai said. “I just think it’ll be a thicker soup, a thicker stew [if we get a] next season.”
Added with a smile, “I think there’s a lot of fun to be had, I will say, if we can do it.”
“Widow’s Bay” is now streaming on Apple TV; new episodes will be released weekly through the finale on June 17.
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