Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.
To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.
Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
Then there are the creatures, one of whom is called the Sea Hag and another the Boogeyman who, without any origin story or continuity, seem to randomly appear and brutally kill people and then disappear. The curse also seems to demand periodic human sacrifices for no reason but who actually carries out the sacrifices or even why they are necessary is never made clear. When the curse unleashes a major storm that forces all the residents into an underground shelter, someone, while in the crowded shelter with no access to any historical records, manages to construct a detailed lineage of the descendants of the original person who founded the island down to a single current resident, and creates a slide show with all their names and dates of birth and deaths. It is believed that the death of this last descendent would lift the curse. This lineage is surely something that the island’s historian who runs the small museum where all the records are kept would have done a long time ago.
There is no problem with introducing a supernatural device as a plot element. The temptation is for writers to use that as a license to bung in random spooky events to create suspense even if they make no sense at all. That is lazy writing and that is what this series is guilty of. The only saving grace in this case is that the acting is good, so I don’t begrudge the acting awards.
Here’s the trailer.
Why did I watch the entire series if it was so bad? The acting was good, the quirky characters interesting, and there were a few funny bits, though too much horror was mixed in for me to classify it as a comedy. But mainly I was hoping that at the end, they would tie up all the loose ends and fill in all the plot holes. But alas, neither happened. A second series of this show is in the works. I will give it a miss.
As a counter-example, I also recently watched the 2022 four-part BBC comedy series The Canterville Ghost based on a novella by Oscar Wilde. Its premise is that a large English country manor has been haunted for five hundred years by the ghost of its former owner Sir Simon de Canterville, condemned to purgatory after being accused of being the cause of the deaths of his wife and child. The ghost is a bit of a ham and enjoys dressing up and finding ways to frighten the successive residents. But a wealthy American family buys the place and moves in and the ghost is offended that not only are they not frightened by him but feel sorry for him and try to help him. The comedy is built around that central premise around which the characters act normally, and I found it to be refreshingly enjoyable after the absurdities of Widow’s Bay storyline.
Here’s the trailer.
And any resident born on the island doesn’t die if they don’t leave it?
I have added that they die as soon as they leave the island.
When fiction is bizarre enough to be termed supernatural, it’s most times problematic because the “rules” that the characters have to abide by are nonsensical, unexplained, and/or freely broken at the whimsy of the makers. It’s pretty hard to react logically to a ridiculous situation without dwelling on how ridiculous it is.
Take zombie movies. Zombies are ridiculous, their very existence breaks multiple laws of reality, the laws of thermodynamics at the very least. So characters jump through hoops to avoid the Z word and pretend there’s going to be some other explanation for the crazy people trying to eat the brains of non-crazy people (only). Then once the audience is in no doubt what’s going on, the characters stop trying to reason it out.
The only real rule when making these stories is that the rules appear plausible enough that (most of) the target audience can suspend disbelief. But usually even the characters who “tell each other” these stories (they’re really telling the audience) are caught out because constructing a logical tale out of illogical premises is hard work. Instead, filmmakers find it easiest to have the supernatural do whatever it damn well pleases, breaking rules as fast as they’re made. Fast zombies, why not?
And the gaping holes in supernatural plots that you see are not part of a bug, they are part of a feature, setting things up for the inevitable sequels. Very rarely is everything satisfyingly resolved in today’s stories, where the writers make it up as they go along. The meandering subplots and shocks conflict too much to be sensibly brought together in time and under budget.
Wouldn’t there be a *serious* inbreeding problem?
Unless they are luring-in egg and sperm donors and then once fertility is established, doing … something with the donors.
Never mind. I won’t be watching it so I don’t really care.
I *will* be watching the Canterville thing.
I had thought about giving Widow’s Bay a chance because Melanie McFarland, writing for Salon, suggested the story as analogous to the United States as a whole, where we ignore the horrors of our history as a nation and suffer consequences as a result of this ignorance…like, not mentioned in the article, electing someone as horrifying as Donald Trump as President not just once, but twice! But I find it hard to find time to myself for such things these days and so I have not watched it.
On that note, you said, “What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.” I certainly agree, but if you’re suggesting it’s unrealistic for people to act in utterly irrational ways as your paragraph following that quote would suggest…again, look at who we re-elected as President. People acting in utterly irrational ways is indeed hard to stomach, but I would argue it is, sadly, a very realistic expectation of what people would do.
As for me, I was never really into the supernatural. zombies, demons, witches, ghosts, curses, vampires, never did anything for me entertainment-wise, save perhaps for Count Floyd, the beleaguered host of ‘Monster Chiller Horror Theatre’. For him I even got the requisite 3D glasses, and boy, did they ever set me back a bunch of bucks!
😉
#4 chigau
Based on Mano’s description, it seems there is no barrier to people arriving and becoming non-native residents. Just as long as we set aside the huge and obvious disincentive: a curse that randomly kills people.
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#6 Leo
Oof, political writers for Salon and elsewhere can stretch an analogy to incredible, transparent, atomic thinness if they have a bee in their bonnet about something. Definitely not a good reason to set aside time to watch even a single episode, let alone a ten episode tv series.
Good fantasy/ urban fantasy / horror is inherently logical. J R R Tolkien went back and made sure there were no inconsistencies in his work, quite an ambition considering how long the whole LOTR is.
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‘Lost’ is a perfect example of writers *not* caring.
And while Lovecraft was a bad writer his stories usually made sense inside his narrative universe.
Please read the “Laundry” series by Charlie Stross for supernatural fiction done right. There is even a secret bureaucracy in Britain -an offshoot of the intelligence services- to manage the incursion of inconsiderate Lovecraftian critters and their allies.
There were only a couple of jump scares , I did not find the horror too much -- but yes the series was carried by the actors. The story is serviceable -- I do not know why people make a fuss about illogic or rationality when humans are illogical and irrational!
Also current real life I guess.
The fate of the universe hangs in the balance! I know lets have a hobbit make a dangerous trek to destroy the all powerful macguffin! But what about all the other brave fearsome warriors and wizards ? The ring has chosen , shrug what can we do ?
@birgerjohansson:
Well, yes. In fiction, internal consistency/coherence is far more important than any sort of external consistency with the rest of reality. People will forgive all sorts of hand-waving and silliness as long as the characters still have vaguely plausible motivations. (See also Star Trek.) It’s part of the standard writer/reader implied contract.
Multi-season TV shows that have a single through-line of plot like ‘Lost’ are difficult due to the number of things that can go wrong that are out of the series creators’ control, including ‘are we even getting a next season’; in the case of Lost, the 2007/2008 writer’s strike certainly didn’t help, but it also felt like the writers had no formal writers’ bible and were just making it up as they went along, and all fan theories were just forms of pareidolia. They just kept going ‘wow, we’re really popular and getting a new season, let’s stretch it out more!’
For an example of handling this done right, see Babylon 5, where J. M. Straczynski (who had been working in TV for years by then) not only created a show with an arc that ran for five years, but also had escape hatches written into the story for every major character so they could be replaced by somebody else who could hit the same plot points in the case of one of the actors no longer being available (and he had to use about half of them). He even managed to deal with the news that they weren’t likely to get the fifth season by compressing story arcs to allow the show to end on the fourth season, and then shuffle things around when the fifth season got green-lit near the end of filming for the fourth season so everything could keep flowing. (Which is why fifth season is a bit weak, as it contains most of the B-plots from both fourth and fifth seasons while most of the A-plots got crammed together into fourth.) Straczynski knew how the business worked, and knew full well that if he didn’t have a plan in place to deal with actors leaving partway through, he was almost certainly going to have to deal with it anyway.
file thirteen @#3, there is a whole school of fantasy and supernatural fiction with carefully thought out systems of magic which the authors do not veer from.
@Jazzlet #13:
Didn’t mean to include all fantasy with my criticism of the supernatural, which to me implies malignant forces. I would have said ghost stories, but the wiggly line includes curses, zombies and demonic possession, although probably not vampires and there are other grey areas.
In case anyone wants to check out the source material of the show Mano is recommending:
https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/trip-reports/trip_report-2026-09-15.153100107790
I watched the first episode and will reserve judgement until I see how it plays out.
If you want a story line with supernatural drama that makes sense, you could do worse than making a TV show from Glen Cook’s “Garrett, P I” series. Also, the novels are genuinely funny.
re: 15 -- oops -- wrong URL.
https://www.wilde-online.info/the-canterville-ghost.html
*Lolsobs in The X-Files, Lost, etc.*
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There’s never a coherent substrate to so many of these “Monster (or other Weird Shit) of the Week” shows.
. . . and, I should add, when the show is supposed to have some underlying story, that’s always an incoherent mess as well.