‘Tis still the season when the theaters are full of kids’ fare and Marvel movies and I catch up on some of the streaming I’ve missed.
I began with Apple TV’s “Widow’s Bay,” which netted 19 of the Emmy Award nominations announced last month. That mainstream recognition is especially impressive when you consider that “Widow’s Bay” is a horror-comedy, a genre blend that was until recently considered even more niche than horror itself.
Created by Katie Dippold (“Parks and Recreation”), the show takes place on a fictional New England isle, home to a podunk fishing village. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), a transplant from the mainland, wants to turn Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard, but old-timer Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root) insists the island is cursed. As we learn over the course of 10 episodes, including a flashback to the settlement’s 18th-century founding, Wyck is all too right.
It’s tempting to say that Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” walked so “Widow’s Bay” could run. Both are pop culture collages, parodying and pastiching a gallery of genre staples. The “Widow’s Bay” pilot, for instance, is a love letter to John Carpenter’s 1980 The Fog, while subsequent episodes draw inspiration from Jaws, The Shining, The Wicker Man and the slasher movie tradition, with emphasis on Halloween.
While “American Horror Story” was notoriously chaotic, however, with as many tedious or tasteless lows as campy highs, “Widow’s Bay” smooths the model into something approaching comfort watching. Like its precursor Twin Peaks, the island welcomes us in and surrounds us with a host of likable eccentrics. Few characters have much depth — the teenagers are especially generic — but a few standout performances make up for it.
While familiar small-screen presences Root and Rhys spar amusingly, the show’s emotional center is Kate O’Flynn as Patricia, Tom’s socially awkward fortysomething assistant, who gets to be both an accidental witch and a final girl. Full of acerbic asides, Patricia serves as the on-screen representative of perhaps the show’s largest target audience: female horror fans who’ve always felt a bit unwelcome in a genre traditionally perceived as male.
“Widow’s Bay” demonstrates just how much that public perception is changing. The show is more creepy and whimsical than actually scary, but it’s a solid watch for anyone who doesn’t see “cozy” and “horror” as antithetical.
My next Apple TV watch was also clearly targeted at midlife women — specifically, ones who feel as if their lives just keep getting messier. In “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” created by David J. Rosen, Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) plays Paula Saunders, a recent divorcée on the brink of a custody battle with her ex (Jake Johnson). A cam boy (Brandon Flynn) offers her affection and empathy with no strings, but that relationship goes south when Paula witnesses what appears to be his abduction on camera. Her investigation leads her into a world of online scammers and corpses, which she explores between coaching her daughter’s soccer team and fact-checking articles (with a red pen, yet) for an implausible middle-class salary.
That’s all I know, because I bailed after three episodes. While Maslany is always likable, the show’s frenetic editing and pounding electronica soundtrack suggest a boomer executive’s idea of what might appeal on TikTok. While “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” has twists and cliff-hangers aplenty, those three episodes never slowed down enough to make me care. Even a witty performance by Dolly de Leon as a no-nonsense detective couldn’t save it.
My last streaming pick was also stylistically excessive, but with more purpose. After a little-heralded theatrical run this February, director Gore Verbinski’s mind-bendy sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has found fans on streaming (Disney+, Hulu, rentable), some of whom hail it as a cult film in the making. Indeed, the pairing of the hyperreal, cartoonish visuals of Verbinski (Rango, several Pirates of the Caribbean films) with the timely satire of writer Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying) produces a heady brew, like Terry Gilliam grappling with the age of ChatGPT.
In a twist on both The Terminator and The Matrix, a self-described Man From the Future (Sam Rockwell) bursts into an LA diner and threatens to blow it up if no one volunteers to accompany him on a quest to defeat a nascent artificial intelligence that will wipe out much of humanity. Having already attempted said quest 117 times, the Man acknowledges the odds aren’t good, but a handful of people volunteer.
In flashbacks reminiscent of “Black Mirror” episodes, we discover that the volunteers have preexisting issues with technology. They include a mom (Juno Temple) who lost her son in a school shooting and received an unsettling form of government compensation; a teacher couple (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) dealing with hordes of phone-zombified teens; and a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson) whose life is circumscribed by her allergy to screens and Wi-Fi.
With a limited number of murky settings, the main action of Good Luck can feel claustrophobic. Its insights about the dangers of “your fascist selfie culture” (as the Man puts it) are smart but scattershot.
But there’s also plenty of trippy fun here, including the most creative CGI monster of recent years, with shades of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Rockwell’s glinty-eyed obsession and Richardson’s sadness anchor the story in something real, making us believe there could be reasons to save ourselves from barreling headlong toward our own obsolescence. The more young folks absorb the gonzo pro-humanity spirit of Good Luck, the better.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Three Streaming Options for the Dog Days of Summer”
This article appears in August 5 • 2026.
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