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Widow’s Bay almost happened a decade ago - but then Kate McKinnon’s Ghostbusters happened
Finding the right time to make a show can be tough, but the long wait to develop Apple TV's Widow's Bay only made it a better show
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It can take time to get a script right. Not just because it needs to be edited and polished, but because sometimes it wouldn’t have the same impact as it might a few years later. Widow’s Bay creator Kate Dippold spent nearly twenty years trying to get the show made, but it needed to wait for the right time. Widow’s Bay transformed from a speculative script for Parks and Recreation and nearly got picked up before Dippold wrote the Ghostbusters reboot. However, she thinks all that waiting made it a better show.
During an interview about the critical acclaim that Widow’s Bay has received since it debuted, Kat Dippold talked about the long journey it has been to get the show made. She had been working on it since before Parks and Recreation. The show kept evolving and changing over the years. “I was never developing anywhere,” she explained. “But there was a period of time right after The Heat was made where I was taking it around – the old version – and almost sold it somewhere. They were gonna put out an offer, but it just didn’t feel like the right time. Ghostbusters came up at the same time, and there was a couple of other things, but deep down, I just had this pit in my stomach. ‘This is not the right time.’ And it wouldn’t have been. It would have been a very different show.”
According to Dippold, Widow’s Bay would have had a much stronger monster-of-the-week vibe than the grounded version that is currently the critical darling of the season, so maybe it was a good thing that Ghostbusters kept it percolating in her mind for all that time.
Widow's Bay Season 1 is streaming on Apple TV now.
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