'Widow's Bay' Meets 'Twin Peaks' in Prime Video's Overlooked 2-Part Crime Comedy
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
The Widow's Bay withdrawal is setting in. Katie Dippold's comedy-horror hybrid wrapped its 10-episode first season on Apple TV+ back in June and picked up 19 Emmy nominations in July. (Because a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and a cultural chokehold apparently weren't enough; it wants the hardware too.)
All of which is to say: if you spent the spring watching Matthew Rhys play a small-town mayor trying to lure unsuspecting tourists to a literal New England hell mouth, you are now in the market for a replacement. And you've probably been wandering the streaming landscape looking for something that fully commits to its scares and its jokes and doesn't make you pick a lane. The good news is the answer already exists. The better news? It’s been waiting for you on Prime Video since 2023, and it just dropped its second season.
A Serial Killer Hits Tasmania's Worst-Timed Arts Festival in 'Deadloch'
Deadloch, created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, opens on a fictional Tasmanian coastal town in the middle of its annual Winter Feastival. (Yes, that spelling is intentional.) A body washes ashore, and Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) gets saddled with an outside investigator: Darwin detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), who arrives with zero filter and an enthusiasm for chaos that Dulcie finds personally offensive. The Twin Peaks parallels are hard to miss — a dead body in a tight-knit nowhere town, an outsider detective pulling at threads the locals would rather leave tied tight. But where David Lynch gave us Douglas firs, diner coffee, and dream logic, McCartney and McLennan plant their feet in something blunter.
Their town isn't eerie; it's awkward, much more like Dippold’s setting. The arts festival grinds forward through a mounting body count because shutting it down would be an economic catastrophe, and the committee would rather deal with a serial killer than a budget shortfall, which feels like the kind of choice Rhys’ character would make given the same problem.
'Deadloch's Detectives Are the Comedy Duo You've Been Missing
The Dulcie-and-Eddie dynamic is what holds the whole thing together. Box's Dulcie is composed, almost to a fault. She micromanages everything and everyone in her life, and she certainly doesn’t want some outsider stomping through her town and making a mess of her first big case. Of course, Sami's Eddie doesn't care. She's loud, crude, works on instinct, and she keeps guessing right when it comes to the town’s secrets, much to the annoyance of Dulcie. Their antagonistic odd-couple pairing carries the show. What starts as open hostility shifts into something harder to name by the end of the season.
Around them, the town fills in fast. Local politicians protecting their own interests, festival organizers trying to hold a crumbling event together, long-buried grudges surfacing at the worst possible moment. Deadloch burns through its first eight episodes without wasting any of them. Every subplot connects back to the investigation or to the community falling apart, and the pace never lets up.
Why 'Widow's Bay' Fans Will Love 'Deadloch'
The tonal overlap with Widow's Bay goes deeper than the surface-level "small town, dark secrets" pitch. Both shows build ensemble comedies about community dysfunction on top of genre scaffolding — a murder investigation in one case, a supernatural curse in the other — and both refuse to signal when they've switched from funny to frightening. You're laughing at an overweight seal terrorizing the townsfolk one second, looking at a decomposing body washed ashore the next. That confidence in the audience is rare, and it's what makes both series so compulsively watchable.
Where they part ways is the atmosphere. Widow's Bay filters its horror through foggy New England and '70s genre nostalgia; Deadloch is so bone-dry that characters will process a threat to their safety through absurd deflection and an almost humorous antipathy. If Dippold's show gave you the creeping dread of a Stephen King adaptation with a comedian's timing, Deadloch delivers a Broadchurch that decided to become Kath & Kim halfway through.
'Deadloch' Season 2 Proves the Show's Formula Has Legs
Deadloch’s first season earned critical love and charted in the top 10 across 165 countries. And yet, it didn’t generate the kind of mainstream conversation it should have. Season 2, which dropped on Prime Video in March 2026, does something worth paying attention to: it moves the entire show to a new location for six episodes, swapping the frozen Tasmanian coast for tropical humidity and red dirt, and rebuilds the formula from scratch with the same lead pair. New town, new crime, new ensemble of locals with things to hide.
Widow's Bay has too much unfinished business in its cursed little town to pull the same geographic trick, but there's still plenty to learn from how Deadloch handled its sophomore run. The show didn't soften its comedy, or sand down Eddie's rough edges, or make Dulcie more likable. It pushed both characters into messier territory, let their partnership get more complicated, and doubled down on the tonal instincts that made its first outing work instead of hedging toward something safer. If Widow's Bay left you restless for something with the same nerve, Deadloch is more than worth your time.
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