For someone who spent their teenage years mainlining Classic Hollywood movies after school, I struggle with watching scripted tv these days. I miraculously finished the first season of a show recently: please applaud. Widow's Bay on Apple TV proved to have that interesting mix of comedy and...horror? that certainly kept me locked in. No spoilers, but the historical elements were my favorite part, and some aspects reminded me a bit of one of my favorite shows, Kingdom on Netflix.
There's something rotten in ancient Korea (Joseon), and the body politic as well as literal bodies are uhh infected with zombie vampirism. There's a broken social order, contagion, interpersonal drama, politics, and incredible action sequences. Think Train to Busan except historical.
What I find wildly impressive about this show is that it's set in 1601 and a particular point in Joseon's history, but it's the easiest-to-understand Korean historical drama I've ever watched. We're told only what we need to know and the cast is actually pretty small for a show of this scale.
Writer/showrunner Kim Eun-hee is an incredible storyteller. One of my favorite things about her shows is when it looks like the team is totally fucked, backs against the wall, they're for sure going to die...and then we cut back to a conversation that we left just a little bit too early, and the plan for how to deal with the problem is revealed to us just as we're about to see it executed. She did this in her mega hit show Signal, and it's just as delicious here. Hard nips!
But the coolest thing about the show was the set pieces where characters fighting against zombies had to use historical weapons with all of their very real limitations. Imagine a man running next to a horse-drawn cart while fighting to get his matchlock gun to stay lit so it could fire on hordes that want to bite and turn him zombie...
Hard enough to cut glass, y'all! Pure cinema!
