Katie Dippold Discusses Her Two-Decade Road to ‘Widow’s Bay’ — and How Its Future Looks

Screenwriter Katie Dippold has done a lot. She’s written for a hit sitcom (Parks & Recreation). She penned a slew of feature films (The Heat, Ghostbusters, Snatched, Haunted Mansion). She’s even tried her hand at acting. And for almost the entirety of her career, she’s been noodling on one project that she, most of the time, never thought would see the light of day. 

Well, Widow’s Bay, the pilot script she just couldn’t put down, is now the word-of-mouth hit of the year. Her dark Apple TV comedy is about an island town full of eccentrics who’ve been besieged by a centuries-old curse. It’s courted the internet’s affection. It’s already renewed for a season. And, after spending an entire career working in Hollywood, it’s given Dippold a rare first: she’s finally a showrunner. She’s handling the exposure that comes with that the best that she can.

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“In my heart, I am a comedy writer, but now I’m representing this bigger thing,” says Dippold. “I just want to do bits, but I know I have to speak in a professional way about a television show that people have put a lot of time and money into. That’s an interesting dilemma, an extroverted introvert.”

Based on a conversation during a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter podcast, I’m Having an Episode (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple), Dippold might be handling her dilemma better than she thinks. Ahead of the June 17 season one finale, she spoke about how the original script changed over the years, what she most wants to explore in future episodes and why, no matter how scary things get, she sees her series as comedy. 

Obviously, you can get a lot from a script. But the tone of this show is so specific. How did you explain the way you wanted it to make viewers feel when you were trying to sell it?

They had read the pilot, but I still felt it was important to make clear that the scary will be scary and the funny will be funny. We never want the scary to feel silly. We want real tension, because I never wanted this to feel like a spoof, to feel campy. There are moments where we break our own rules, but that was the main cell.

In straddling that, did you feel like you had to establish guardrails in the writers room?  

I do think of it as a comedy, first and foremost. The amount of time that we spent in the writers room, thinking about the humor of this show. And that meant having to be brutal and cutting a lot of jokes and being strategic about where they’re placed. It’s not joke, joke, joke. We put a lot of care into the jokes that are in the show. Also, as a horror fan, I want to know that that stuff is being taken seriously. I want to feel like I could go to this island and it would be a real place and these are real characters you could talk to.

A lot of the humor is ultimately derived from the fact that these are funny characters put into these tense scenarios. 

That’s kind of the way the actors approached it, too. They’re in a drama. But that only works because, on top of being incredible actors, they are naturally funny. They know what’s funny.

You’d been working on some version of this pilot for almost two decades. It was your spec when you interviewed to get on Parks and Recreation. How much did the idea change over time? 

It’s the same… but different. It made it easy for Mike Schur to get a sense of my humor and my joke writing. That got me that job. But there was no real tension in it. It wasn’t as grounded. And it wasn’t serialized. Even though now, there’s a monster of the week element, there is still a larger story we’re telling. So, I just spent years thinking about it because I didn’t feel like it was right to do that show. I don’t know that I would have watched that show if I’m being honest.

So, it was just years of working on it, taking it apart, putting it back together, throwing things out, trying things. This is ridiculous, but whenever I went to New York, I’d go to the Museum of Natural History. I’d walk around and I would imagine what the Widow’s Bay version of the display cases would look like. That, weirdly, opened things up for me. The more I thought about the history of this island, that made it feel like a real place. 

In all of that time, were you thinking “I have to make this,” or was it just an exercise for you? 

I didn’t know if this would ever get made or if it would just be the fun thing I worked on on the side. But show business — am I the only person that calls it show business? — It’s gotten harder over the years. It’s gotten more fear-based. People just kind of want something that’s like something else that was recently successful. I was just having a tough time. I was getting frustrated, so I thought I would take a swing at this. It still felt like a real long shot. I really didn’t think it was going to sell or get made.

Did you ever come close? I was never developing anywhere, 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 are 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.

Spending so much time with this on your own, does that make you more protective of it when you sort of surrender so much of it to the writers room? 

You have to protect the story you want to tell and how you want it to feel. You have to know what you’re trying to do. And this was the first time I’ve ever show run before. When I don’t know how to do something, you can see it in my face. I’m not a “lean in” person. I fake it till you make it.  But I really, really knew what I wanted this to feel like. If you can hang on to that, then it makes everything easier. So, the writer’s room is just a gift. There’s a world where I could write these 10 episodes all by myself, but I have a room of people and they understood the job and they want to help me make this show. I wish I could write movies that way. 

How did you approach populating this writers room, in terms of comedy and drama writers? 

There was definitely a version of the show that could have been me and seven other comedy writers. That could have worked, because comedy writers are also very good at story. They’re very smart people. But for some reason, I did this a little differently because I think the show is just so strange. I knew it needed a mythology and a lore and a sense of deep time. I just wanted to find the most interesting brains and put together this ensemble. I had a couple of people that were from WandaVision. One of them had a spec that was hilarious. The other one had one of the darkest scripts I’ve ever read in my entire life. It was so specific and so sharp. I really think this show needs. And even if some episodes lean more comedic and some get a little bit scarier and some or some go deeper into the lore, it should still feel like one tone. 

You mentioned you’re an extroverted introvert. You famously dressed as the Babadook for a Halloween party where no one else wore a costume. A photo of it went viral, annually. Do you think that’s a good indicator of your personality? 

One time, I did Kiefer Sutherland’s character from The Lost Boys, which really worked on me. We have the same coloring, especially when my hair is highlighted. (Laughs.) But that was almost too much, because I went to a Halloween store in Burbank and they did the makeup and the prosthetics and I had to drive home like that — which felt insane. That night, I did an improv show and I made everyone dress up. It was almost another Babadook situation because I ended up doing improv scenes where I just happened to be dressed like Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys. That kind of thing happens to me a lot.

Do you organize Halloween events every year? 

Every year. I have 15 or 20 old comedy friends from New York that all live in L.A. now. They’ll come over, and we’ll do a horror movie night. Every year I’ll say, “Listen, we’re going keep it light.” But then, every year, I’ll do something like hire a man dressed as Michael Myers to lurk in the yard and terrorize them as they come inside. When they leave, he’s still out there waiting for them.

It’s been a minute since you made a feature. With all of this energy around Widow’s Bay, an original idea, is there a script you’re ready to put out there?  As long as I’m showrunning the show, there’s really not much else I can do. But I still love writing movies. I would love to do it again.

If you had your druthers, how much Widow’s Bay is there in you?

A big part of the fun in the writers room was that we thought a lot about the history of the island and what’s been going on since the founder up until today. There was a lot of stuff that we couldn’t do or just decided to not do yet. Between that and characters that we have, there’s a lot. I would love to do a Rosemary episode for Dale Dickey, a Dale episode with Jeff Hiller. There’s so many characters to get to know more. I always wanted it to feel like there’s a lot to explore in the island. Little nooks and crannies full of terror that you haven’t seen yet. And I really want to get more into Bashir, Kevin Carroll’s character. There would be a lot more to do.

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