Recommendations: Week of May 18

Now is the time to use that Apple TV+ free trial

I pay for every streaming service, basically, but I have patience and self-denial problems. If you’re trying to pace out your subscriptions instead, consider this your moment to jump on Apple TV+. Apple is a strange beast of a streaming service — it doesn’t have transparent profit/loss goals and only rarely cancels shows. It’s thus quite hard to tell how popular any show is on the service, or indeed any show anywhere anymore, as streaming services tend to release cryptic statements about viewership rather than useful metrics. I would like this to be different. It’s difficult for journalists and critics to know what to even write about these days; increasingly, a lot of reviews seem to be written because the critic either loved or really didn’t love the work. While that can be fun, it feels like a lot of less splashy shows are falling through the cracks.

Anyway, one of my favorite shows of the year is currently streaming on Apple (Widow’s Bay), and their new thriller starring the supernaturally talented Tatiana Maslany (Maximim Pleasure Guaranteed) is a twisty delight. There are a couple of interesting things coming to the service soon, most notably a very dramatic-looking remake of Cape Fear starring Patrick Wilson, Amy Adams, and a ghoulish Javier Bardem. Below are my thoughts on the ones I’m most enjoying on the service this month.

Widow’s Bay: This show follows the mayor of a small island community, played by Matthew Rhys. Something is profoundly wrong with this island. Matthew Rhys’s character is a non-believer and something of an outsider, having grown up on the mainland. He is also obsessed with bringing tourism and money to the island, something almost everyone else is demonstrably against. As he has some success with this, securing a NYT feature that calls the island “the next Martha’s Vineyard” and thus flooding the island with day-trippers and bachelorette weekends, the horrors of the island awaken and terrorize everyone in weird and hilarious ways.

This show is that rare and fluttery thing: a horror comedy. There have been other successful horror comedies (Scream, Cabin in the Woods, Happy Death Day, Twin Peaks), but it is extremely difficult to pull off the tone this show is pulling off. Too often, the comedy mutes the impact of the horror, or the horror makes the comedy seem trivial. Too often, it feels like the comedy scenes and the horror scenes are in two different shows/movies. This show blends everything perfectly, living right on the line where laughter becomes hysterical laughter and hysterical laughter becomes hyperventilating terror. It pays homage to those who came before, with references to Twin Peaks and every Stephen King book ever written, it seems, but it stands firmly on its own as a weird little gem, and I absolutely adore it. Everyone is batting for the fences, and everyone is having the time of their lives.

A note: I know the word “horror” can scare people off (haha) so I will say this is more like a very spooky mystery than a true horror show. It is not (at least so far) very bloody and is kind of like… really adult Scooby Doo.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: Oh, Tatiana Maslany, where have you been on my screen!? Condemned to the purgatory of late-Marvel television (She-Hulk), perhaps? Maslany is best known for her incredible work on Orphan Black, a sci-fi show that ran from 2013-2017 and on which she played 17 distinct characters (it’s about clones). I have missed her acting chops, and they are on full display here as she plays Paula, a woman whose life is falling a bit apart (more so when she finds the dead body of the cam-boy she’s been chatting with for months). Paula is your classic amateur sleuth — her job as a fact checker for a magazine has made her particularly good at asking questions and she’s also your classic woman on the verge — about to lose custody of her daughter, has a mysterious crack-up on Portland in the background, turning to the manufactured intimacy of online porn rather than to a therapist/friend/real lover. She throws herself into finding the cam-boy who starts scamming her in the first episode, and when she does find him (dead), she starts pulling at threads in a desperate/doomed attempt to take control of her life. Also, it’s very funny.