Critique of the Teenage Character

This message comes from One B Willie, celebrating the life and art of Willie Nelson, hosted by music writer John Spong. Willie's friends, family, and collaborators talk about One Willie song they love, and who is Willie Nelson? Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts A mayor of a small island town might deal with a lot, infrastructure, finances, superstitions about local curses, and of course, actual local curses. You might have heard people talking about the new Apple TV series Widows Bay. It's funny and creepy and follows just such a mayor as he desperately tries to protect the reputation of his town And he sticks with it, even as the evidence mounts that the island is in fact in the grip of something supernaturally dangerous. I'm Glenn Weldon. and I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about Widows Bay on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us is NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzlaben, Wlcome back, Danielle. I am so happy to be on this episode. Thank you so much And we are, of course, so happy to have you. Widows Bay focuses on mayayor Tom Loftess, played by Matthew Reese. Tom confronts the fact that his job as mayor comes with some very special challenges from an ominous fog to an inn that the locals are afraid to stay in overnight, which causes some difficulties with tourism. Tourism is Tom's great dream for Widows Bay, especially when he persuades a New York Times travel writer to visit. Local residents include Patricia, who works for Tom. She's played by Kate O'Flynn. There's also Wick played by the great Stephen Root. Wick is a fisherman who is certain there is a curse on the island. It's a haunt I didn't realize it was a I'm sorry. Could you remind me again Hunt is Wse than a spook, but not as bad as a fright. Oh, , equal to a scare, right? You can mock me all you like The islands cursed Tom. There's a lot going on in these ten episodes. so let's get into it, Glenn. I'm going start with you. I think you were the first person that I knew who was watching and enjoying this show. How'd you like it? I really did. I knowew I loved it from the jump. I mean, you can't cast Matthew Rese and Stephen Root and Dale Dickkey and Jeff Hiller who has a small part. They don't do enough with him, but he's got a small part. You can't cast those folks and not be Glenn Katnip Then later, you're gonna throw in Betty Gilpin and then Hamish Linklater, who also plays Richard Warren, the guy who created the town Founder of the town. Founder of the town. You're not playing fair. That is ridiculous, But then something happens in episode seven where we get the perfect joke, the best joke ever, the platonic ideal of jokes. That's when Tom enters a room where Wick and Patricia have been questioning the corpse, the zombie or whatever of Richard Warren, Tom picks up what we know to be Patricia's noteepath, Kato Flyn character. He flips a page and we read Hello, I am Patricia. But that's not the joke. that's the setup Perfect joke, the best joke happens next, he flips a page and we read Are you mad at something I said, question mark? Now that is so perfect because it grows so organically, intrinsically, inevitably from theseese specific characters in this very specific and let's stipulate, you know wacky situation, Richard Warren, we've met him before in a flashback. We know kind of a grumpy guss, right? Even back when he had a pulse, he was kind of a grumpy guss. And so he's been a few centuries trapped in a coffin And you'd expect him to be a bit prickly. But we the viewers haven't seen him in dead guuy form yet. That's important. That's part of the note. We are active in this process because we're gaining information from this noteepad about this interaction that we haven't seen. But then Patricia is the character find of twenty twenty six. The best thing about this show, such an amazing creation. She told you from the first moment we met her. that she's not going to be just a stock character. that she's somebody very specific, somebody real, somebody worth spending some time with She's so easily wounded and she's seething with just Every We have seen her enough to know how she navigates the world and are you mad at something I said We just think, yeah, that's where she would go. It works because so wildly incongruous, but at the same time, because of the work they've been doing to set up the characterization, the writing, the performance feels inevitable. and when we arrive at it, we are surprised that that's where she would go, but then we're not. and that's why it's the perfect joke and that's why love this show becausecause the show is filled with stuff like that. All right, so you do I am getting from your reaction like the show. Love the show. Very good, very good. Danielle, how about you? How'd you like Widows Bay? I absolutely loved it. It's one of my favorite things I've seen in a while on TV except there is an asterisk here. and we're not going to go into detail, but The season finale left me kind of cold. It didn't stick the landing for me. That is all I'm going to say. Because the rest of the season is so good that I still, you know, unqualifiedably would say, yes, go out and watch this. It's fantastic. For various reasons that Glenn got into first of all the show is just a festival of actors where you're like, that guy. I love that guy. I mean, Hamish Linklater is one of my people where I just think put him in everything. If you haven't seen him in Midnight Mass, by the way, go watch that series. He's wonderful. Speaking of Creepy people, yes But there's also, yeah, Chris Fleming Benny Gil and all the people you listened. So it's delightful. Matthew Reese, who Of course I loved in the Americans, I was delighted to see He's not a chameleon actor like Daniel Day Lewis where he disappears into a part, but Eergy in this is so different from the guy you saw in the Americans. There's an episode where he does mushrooms. H abbsolutely terrified, baffled He's almost reduced to being a toddler affect that episode is So funny. it's perfection I think maybe the best thing I can say about the show is the perfect blend of funny and scary. The first couple episodes, I thought of thirirty Rock. like there is a joke density there. Eespecially when the New York Times traravel writer is being walked through that little town museum Tour guide Jerry walked past a blood spattered dress and her very nice little old lady voice goes, it? And I was just about to show Arthur the witch trial H? Great source of pride. We call them We burned him. You know what? you know what, Jerry? I'm going to take it from here We got them we burned them. I love that jice. Dying. Yeah. It's wonderful. It's so funny, the scary stuff. It's not ruin your night, Sary, but like there's a se haag, there's a clown. They both freaked me out. This is something I haven't seen before on TV. I was delighted the whole time. Yeah. It's funny that you mention sort of Matthew Reese in a different form because I first saw Matthew Rese. on the ABC broadcast familyily drama Brothers and Sisters. which was your basic sort of like familyam drama And so I had originally seen Matthew Reese in this more kind of like sweet guy kind of way. And so to me, it was somewhat surprising when he then became the Americans and that super intense stuff. So to me, this is sort of coming back to a bit of a looseness and an informality in his personality, a silliness I remember from when I first saw him in that show and thought he was very charming. I don't think this is quite my catnip as much as it is, say, Glen's. But I do think I enjoyed it a lot. It is very funny. You know, you mentioned Danielle that museum tour also zeroed in on that line about the witches because that is a great line, right? It is so common now when people talk about burning witches. It is seen as a great sign of shame and all of that And the fact that she's just so proud of it. You know, we caught them, we burned them is very funny. And of course, the creator, Katie Dipold, is a very funny writer. She came out of parks and recreation and the heat and some other things I really like And it's funny because there is a lot of parks and reccks in this show, in the GNA of this show the kind of bureaucracy of local government and The effort to kind of keep a town running when everyone is mad at you all the time is very parks and rack withith this really strange overlay of horror and curses and all that stuff. And eventually, you know, we mentioned Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linkidater who show up in a kind of a flashback episode going back a very long time in history to kind of get at how this whole curse started and how The founder of the town was involved and everything I enjoyed that a great deal. And one of the things I like about it is that it is a very serialized show that has episodes that are still constructed as episodes. like There is that flashback episode. There is an episode where Tom, the mayor goes and stays overnight at the inn There is a wonderful episode where Patricia is kind of menaced by this bookie manan that they have in town And she's wonderful in that episode. And it is kind of set apart, know they never completely disconnect from that serialized narrative but they construct the individual episodes as episodes, which is something that I think when you can do it well, it has benefited a lot of shows from, you know, the bear has benefited from that. This show benefits from that. When you can take an episode and be like, this is part of a serialized narrative, but it has its own structure. I think that works really well. But again, you know I think the cast packed with ringers is in a lot of ways the secret weapon. You know, Stehven Rot is doing everything here that you want to see Stehen Rot do you know, it's kind of an average of everything Sthen has done in his life. You get a little Jimmy James, you get a little, you know, office space, you get a little a little of this, little of that, little all over the place, definitely a little of the guy he recently played in the movie on Hulu, Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice So all the MVPs, Betty Gilpin keeps popping up in things. You know, she pops up in that JO Romcom office romance that they have right now. She's kind of the assistant She keeps popping up. It's always welcome. I love to see her. She elevates everything she's in and she elevates this as well. So to me, it's a good show, solid bones, you know, But then just studed with this like, you know, Dale Dickkey is really there to do a big scene late in the series, a big and important scene And she just gets every single drop out of that sce. I want you to picture this Your little girl and your finger gets broken off by a wagon wheel Next thing you know, your dad's dead and your stepmom is taking you on an adventure. Destination hell. I mean, you mentioned both the serialized nature of this and also All of these actors just batting a thousand And I feel like those kind of combine to create another aspect of the show that I love, which is that this show never feels like it was phoned in. Like this show feels very thoughtful for how funny it is. I think horror can be easy to dismiss as just a genre, you know, But They got Ty West to direct that episode. That's the flashback. Ty West who directed Pearl, Maxine, those movies that Mia Goth was in I mean, they wanted horror and they did horror and they did it, I think, remarkably well. And similarly, there are so many references in this series. There are references, I think to lost. There's definitely Jaws. I mean, you talk about Stehen Root. He's pretty much quint from time to time. And I don't mean that in a lazy way. They didn't rip anything off. He's doing his own thing. I think that's another thing I just liked about it. This feels like a show where the people writing it and making it We're having so much fun and we're putting so much care into it. And I think that's another reason that this just really hit home with me. Yeah. Well, we've got more to say about Widows Bay after this a little break This message comes from Dell teechnologies. Get long lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Sies three and Telcore. 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New York City join NPR's tiny desesk contest winner, Cure for Paranoia at Warsaw this july ninth. It's all the NPR tiny Desk ennergy minus the office furniture Get your tickets now at tinydesktour. org Welcome back. Glen, what are you thinking about? The premise is very simple. It's what if the Mayor from Jaws was our main character. Bically. But instead of a shark, it was spooky stuff. And you know, the way that Rehese is playing him, You know, Rese can be kind of a goofball. If you've ever seen him on the wine showh, which is a reality series he did with Matthew Good, where they're just two bros hang out getting a little buzzed as they drink wines around the world. He's a goofball and he brings to this character as he moves through this community, a little air of annoyance and frustration. There's a little read of Basil faulty to him. Not enough to make him like horrible, but it's just there. Now when this series started, we talked about the episodic nature I liked it fine, but I was worried that it was sliding into a Monster of the Week format that felt formulic. You know, I felt like this show I loved that was so weird getting a kind of CW treatment That's why I really responded and I was surprised when I responded as much as I did when we widened out and got into the Sing along with me, The world builduilding, The lore, the backstory. For the first time I can remember in a long time, I didn't hate a flashback episode because it brought such a different energy it brought Betty Gilpin and Hy Mish Link later and all that stuff. And I was like, okay, now I'm into the zone if it had maintained the monster of the Week format, even though there were some really good episodes in it, I think I might not have responded as strongly as I did, but I'm seeing a lot of people who say the exact opposite that as soon as it widens out, it kind of loses them, Where did you guys fall down on them? I think I responded to both. As I said, I don't think I responded to either half of it quite as much as some people have. I mean, I know so many people who this is immediately their favorite show of the year. To me, it is a show I really like. I don't know that I responded to it you know, all that differently, but I think had it stayed on the track that it was on at the beginning, I think, as with many serialized shows that was something that could only maintained for a certain period of time. And I do think in particular, You know, there's a little bit of ambiguity at the beginning about whether there's really a curse. and what I'm glad they didn't do is spend a lot of episodes being like Is there really a curse or is there not really a curse?. They pretty quickly establish, oh, there's a curse. And even though Tom starts off I think very earnestly saying, I don't believe in curses. There's no such thing as curses. you know, people just have bad luck and also he can't bear to think that there could be a curse because he's so committed to building tourism in the local community. But I'm glad that they didn't sit very long in the Tom figures out there's a curse space because that, I think would have gotten old quickly. The widening out worked for me. I hear you say that, Glenn and it does make sense because the first right, We start off with a couple of monsters of the week. I hadn't even thought of that, but the widening out works, I think, because If I'm recalling correctly, the episode where it widens out, especially is episode four which is an episode we spend almost entirely with Patricia. and it is Banger of an episode. But the thing is, it doesn't have the same energy as the first few. Like I said, it's not quite as laugh out loud funny the whole time. It's much more darkly funny. There's some yellow jackets in there. It's weird, but it's delightfully weird. And like you said, who do you want to spend more time within the show than Patricia, who you know works with the mayor in town haall I think that that is perhaps why the widening out works so well because the first time you really get to pull out and see more, you get to be with her. Her book moobile, by the way, is called The Patdty Wagon. That is wonderful, That is perfection. just such a good touch. Yep. And when we learn in the second episode that they didn't print Patricia's poem and the Gide to the Town, we can see in Tom's face that he's the reason And they didn't print that bow on it. Yeah neverever made a big thing. It's just a thing. Can we talk about who I wanted to spend a little less time with? And this is my bugaboo with all of these. I know what you're gonna say. The surly teeen. Y. The Sly teeen. Y. Evan played by Kingston Rumy Southwick, No fault of the actors, fault of that character. I realize how much of the show That's Toms son. That's Tom' son A lot of the show's emotional heart resides with him One of the reasons Tom is so worrid is A he wants tourism, but B, he's really worried about his kid and I get that. what happens to him But if I never see another surly teen on my TV screen, I'll be happy he just fits a trope. Yeah, I think that the show and in fact, more and more as the show progresses, you learn that Tom's worry is centered on his son And on some of the strange things about the town, one of which is that there's sort of a superstition that people who are born on the island can't leave and his son was born on the island. So he worries if he accepts that there's a curse, then he's accepting my son can never leave.. And that really, you know, worries and concerns him. So he's stuck in this place of denying there's a curse, but also sort of guarding against the possibility that there's a curse. And I think his worry over his kid, that's where you get the most color to Tom that is separate from how he feels about being the mayor, right? Beause otherwise you really get just Tom as mayor, Tom as Leslie Nope of Widows Bay And because he has this son and he's widowed get a different kind of sense of what the stakes for him are because originally you kind of think the stakes for him are just being mayor and wanting to fix tourism and bring tourism and be quote unquote successful makeake the next Bar harbor or whatever it is I think you learn from the kid that there are other stakes than that for him. And I think probably it needed that, but I am not surprised At your response, I do think television shows struggle to differentiate teenagers and make them interesting and lovable and different And often when the kid is supposed to create stakes for the parent, you get the kid being kind of distant and standoffish from the parent And when that happens the kid can be a cold presence. And I think when you say surly, I sort of get a chill between the kid and the parent And that can make it difficult to kind of latch on to the teenage character when they're being used essentially as part of the story of the parent I really agree. I think the show kind of did that character dirty because He's a character where I just had to force my brain to not think about him too much. Once you realized, oh, this kid has never been off the island I was, w, wait wa That child is not merely surly. That child is probably quite angry, that child has some issues going on, That child is sheltered. That child is more than a kid who goes off and smokes weed and flirts with the tourist girls. That child has some stuff going on, I will say mildly. and Yes. The show just kind of m about his mother. Yes, he lost his mother. He doesn't know his mother It's very upsetting and the show just doesn't give him the depth that that kid would most definitely have. And it's a real missed opportunity. Yeah. And I think also the show does not figure out any way in which he's funny. And that's one of the difficulties when you are on a show where everybody else is funny at least part of the time. I'm so delighted that this show includes the absolutely delightful K Callen who if you don't think you know who Kay Callen is