Widow’s Bay s1e4: “Beach Reads”

basically spoiler-free!My friend Caro and I were discussing Apple TV+’s Widow’s Bay, which I super enjoy because the real horror—and the coziness, and the comedy of it all—is grounded in believable human reactions and interactions, in the awfulness of having more information than you had a day earlier. The supernatural antics are just mood, MacGuffin, psychological shorthand, seasoning. The show centers its lens on the tension awakening in its main character, Mayor Tom Loftis: the massive gap between what he rationally, cognitively believes and, deep underneath, what he really believes, a memory he barely holds at bay, a secret he resolutely keeps from his coworkers, his son, and especially from himself. Caro and I were specifically discussing episode 4, “Beach Reads,” and its complicated messaging about a survivor’s personal account of her own life-threatening experience. Because her account of events has been unanimously shrugged off and dismissed by the townspeople as mere…