Apple TV+ has carefully curated a library of ambitious programming that’s quietly become one of the top streaming destinations for genre content. Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay chronicles the daily ins and outs of a remote New England island community that’s subjected to a cryptic curse that’s centuries in the making.
Spirits, serial killers, and gruesome grimoires put Widow’s Bay’s standing as a premier tourist town in jeopardy. The series has resonated with audiences through its exceptional writing, directing, and acting. However, its painstaking production design is the true secret weapon that’s helped Widow’s Bay become an instant hit and pop culture sensation that’s positioned to be the big winner at this year’s Emmy Awards.
To celebrate the series’ Production Design Emmy nomination, among many others, Production Designer Steve Arnold breaks down how he achieved the community’s timeless, creepy quality, drawing subtle production design cues from Jaws and The Shining, the obscure Easter Eggs that fans are still discovering, and his hopes of more period piece episodes in season two.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: Widow’s Bay is a contemporary series, but it feels removed in time in many respects due to the remoteness of the island. It’s almost like it’s a few decades behind, with things like the rotary phones and older TV sets. Talk a little on achieving that dynamic and figuring out what belongs and what doesn’t in this world.
STEVE ARNOLD: Some of it was driven by the script. Many things were pretty well indicated in the script. This is a situation where it’s so remote that people hang on to things for much longer than you would ordinarily, in most cases. These people don’t always have the latest and greatest things. It seems like if technology is not really up to date there, then maybe people have given up on trying some of those things and they’ve just managed to get by with less. It’s kind of an analog for the world, in many ways. A lot of those things are part of the set dressing. Some of the broader strokes, like the interior of the town hall, I wanted it to kind of seem like it was maybe an older building from the 1800s. Maybe they upgraded in the ’50s, but they haven’t done much to it since then, so the paint and paneling are very dated and out of a time that’s no longer contemporary even though it’s set in a contemporary time period. So elements like that help push that feeling a little bit.
Also, when you’re in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and some of those places, there’s a lot of hanging onto the old. There are many old structures, houses, and things like that, which are rare on the West Coast. They get knocked down after they’ve only been standing for a few years. In those places, they kind of cherish that history that is inherent in a place that was settled much earlier. We’re talking about an island that was settled at the turn of the 1600s to 1700s. This dated and not-contemporary look for the buildings and various structures just made a lot of sense.
What were some of the difficulties in finding the right locations to shoot in or to use for exteriors? They all still feel so connected and at peace with each other, but I imagine you’re pulling from all sorts of different places.
SA: Yeah, we had some very good locations people. We actually started out looking for a coastal village much farther north, but then decided to try to find something a little bit closer. We went to Rockport to do a bunch of the exterior stuff, but one of the most difficult challenges we faced was with the Breakwater Inn. It had to be kind of rundown and a little derelict, but it was written as a Victorian building. Everyone wanted to find the perfect building that had the perfect exterior and the perfect interior that worked wonderfully for the show. It didn’t happen.
I knew we were going to be building the Captain’s Suite. That whole corridor, the parlor, the lobby, and all that stuff was so specific about what it needed to do. We looked at all kinds of things back there, but we couldn’t find the right exterior. I knew we were building the interior. We couldn’t find the exterior. The director of photography was renting an apartment nearby in this small town and drove by the building that we ended up using for the exterior. We changed the front porch and the entry door and all of that for the action that we needed, and it worked out really well. Then, in post, I wanted them to add this little tower piece that’s on the top that we kind of borrowed from the house in Psycho, which has the same mansard roof element at the top. I think the shot looked really great the way they did it.
That’s so interesting about the Psycho connection because I also noticed matching set design elements from Jaws and The Shining, some of which are so subtle and obscure. How did you determine when it made sense to include these fun visual nods and when it was more appropriate to do something else?
SA: We tried not to hit the audience over the head with it too hard, but we had a lot of fun just pulling things from classics. I was watching Jaws, and there’s a conference room space in its town hall that has these little framed letters or something on the walls, which are otherwise very vacant. So we copied things like that. There’s a shot in Jaws where Roy Schneider is walking down the town hall’s hallway, and he hits his head on one of these low-hanging little signs. So we copied that, dead-on. You know, we took screengrabs from Jaws and matched all these little bits and pieces.
The drapery in the Loftis’ kitchen matches the fabric from Roy Schneider’s house in Jaws that’s hanging over the table, too. The kitchen is really a pretty close match to stuff from Jaws. When I was reading the first couple of scripts and read about the Breakwater Inn, I just immediately saw elements from The Shining. We were maybe going to try to do that iconic carpet, with the geometric pattern. It’s very, very graphic. However, it just didn’t fit in with what we were doing with the whole Victorian look. So we kind of moved away from that, but there’s the scene in the Captain’s Suite bathroom where Tom goes and listens to the countdown on New Year’s Eve; that’s directly from The Shining. Katie [Dippold] had written that specifically as something that should match, so we had a lot of fun with all those things.
There is such meticulous detail going on in Widow’s Bay between the “Teeth” and “Daddy’s Home” board games, Patricia’s grimoire, and all the newspaper clippings and ephemera at the Historical Society. How do you determine the right balance between making these things feel unsettling and haunted, but still realistic and rooted in reality?
SA: We were lucky to have a brilliant graphic designer working with us who I’ve known and worked with for more than 25 years. With the games, they were delineated fairly clearly from the script, so we handed it off to the graphic designer, and she came up with a bunch of versions. I remember them. We had all kinds of versions for “Teeth.” I think that’s a visual joke that landed really well when this playfully fun character is the setup for this pair of rusty pliers.
With the board game that they play, we went through a bunch of different versions of that. The little pieces that move, if you look carefully, you’ll see that there’s a bat, a belt, a rolled-up newspaper. These are all elements of, you know, “Daddy’s mad and he’s going to take it out on somebody!” Those were little subtle things that maybe not everybody catches. The newspaper articles are interesting. The cannibalism in the church piece went through I don’t know how many versions before we finally came up with one that everybody was satisfied with. We made it much bigger so that you really get the impact of it. All the other elements in the Historical Society, like the graphics of the priest being eaten by a whale or whatever, were things that we were able to find in historical documents that were copyright free, we could get the rights to them, or we modified them enough so that they weren’t a legal problem.
That’s so interesting too, because that’s the show in a nutshell, right? It’s mixing these fabricated elements with things from reality that are still very dark. You feel that overlap, and it’s really well done.
SA: The one thing you might not notice unless you’re really paying attention is that when Tom is talking to the reporter, and they’re talking about cannibalism, if you look over the reporter’s shoulder, there’s a mannequin in a straitjacket. So, you know, just twisted things in the background like that. This was the kind of thing that Katie and Hiro [Murai] were both pushing for. They wanted to get these really graphic images in there.
The flashback episode to 1702 was a standout episode from this season that got a really positive response from fans. What were the joys and difficulties of getting to play in an entirely different century, and are you hoping for more of that kind of thing in season two?
SA: I love doing period stuff. I live for it. So I’m really, really happy with that material. We looked and looked and looked for the exterior of Richard Warren’s house, and luckily we found a fantastic house from the 1600s. It’s a real house. They took it all apart and moved it there, sometime in the ’80s. You may not be able to tell in the episode, but there’s a whole other house behind that house that’s also from roughly the same time period. People live in that house. They had told us previously they had an old house from the 1800s, but they really felt that that wasn’t old enough for them. They wanted something even older. Once we got in there, we were able to document what was there, how it was gone, how it was built, how the stairway went, and all those things. Little details like the trim around the doors and all that stuff. We were able to lift all of that stuff from an actual early colonial house, and so that was fantastic.
I love that the costuming also strongly reinforces the community’s eerie energy. Everything has this lived-in and foreboding aesthetic that’s conveyed, even by ordinary costumes that aren’t necessarily meant to be creepy. How was that accomplished?
SA: So we had a fantastic costume designer, Alex [Bovaird]. She’s British and had done a lot of research on what the real colonial people wore because a lot of it has been bastardized. When you see it in various shows, it’s not really right. So she was very, very particular about making sure that if this guy was from this particular year, then he would display these kinds of things, this kind of hat, this kind of shoe, waistcoat, whatever. She really got into it!
All that applies to Widow’s Bay’s contemporary timeline, too. Some of the stuff that Patricia is wearing, for instance, has an eeriness to it even when it’s just technically regular clothes.
SA: If you look at it really closely, you will see that Shelley Duvall from The Shining is in a lot of the stuff that Patricia wears. There’s a connection there with the styling. The wardrobes aren’t dead-on copies, but it’s the same style, the same feel, and everything else. When you watch her, and then you watch Shelley Duvall in The Shining, it’s just eerie, and you see that there’s a kind of connectivity there.
Speaking of Patricia, one of my favorite things from the season is everything between Patricia and the Boogeyman. The Boogeyman has such the perfect look that’s both familiar and feels ripped out of a slasher movie, but still different and original. How was that design figured out, and was anything else considered?
SA: We went through many, many versions. They had many, many different versions and props. Morgan [Kling], our props master, had various sculpts made of all these different kinds of slasher faces. We went round and round before we finally narrowed it down. It took quite a while to come up with that final slasher boogeyman face.
This show is absolutely filled with production design Easter Eggs that fans are still continuing to discover. Do you have a favorite and are there any that seem to have gone undetected so far?
SA: There’s a lot of things. I mean, it’s quite amazing what we were able to cram in there. When I got the job, I was in Los Angeles, and I knew I was going to go to Massachusetts to shoot it. We were already thinking about things that we were going to need, like graphic artwork on the walls and things like that. I knew we needed a map of the island, and I had the first three scripts and outlines for the rest of the show, basically. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where Tom’s on mushrooms and all that. There had been a bit in there where he’s drawing around his hand, like the hand drawing that the shaman shows him. You know, it’s the whole “kid’s turkey drawings” where you put your hand on a piece of paper and draw around it.
So, I thought, I need a shape for the island. I drew around my hand, and I made it sort of very jagged and primitive and rough. So the island shape, when you see the maps, the brochure, the satellite imagery, and all the other graphics that have that in it, that hand drawing is my original hand drawing that I gave to the graphic designer. From that, we figured out where the town would be on the hand and all those other things. But beyond all that, this hand or this island has a grip on people. They can’t escape. They’re caught. They’re being held sort of against their will, in a way. That whole hand subtleness, I think, is an interesting connection.
This is a show where there are just so many cyclical callbacks and ideas that echo through generations. The fact that the map is a hand and Tom is going through that same process with his own hand, on its own, is a really cool thematic connection.
SA: And I was surprised at how many people, as you said, are taking screengrabs and figuring all this stuff out. People actually noticed this and called it out! They were like, “It’s a hand!” I thought it was pretty abstract and unrecognizable, but they still got it!
You’re going to have to trace your foot next season or something! Lastly, what’s on your wishlist for season two? What would you like to see or do more of next year?
SA: We built 25 sets, at least, on stage. I love building scenery. I love designing and building real things. So any new ideas that they come up with there would be great. Again, I love period stuff. If we can do some more things from the 1700s, or whenever, that would be a dream.
