Andy Greenwald

One of the things that we love about Widow's Bay is that from the very beginning, in the first 15 minutes, Mayor Tom Loftus communicates to the guy from the New York Times that there are no cell phones on the island.

And he just said it.

And then it's done.

And then all the problems of modern suspenseful storytelling are just vanished.

They just vanish.

And you can tell a story in a more familiar and classic way.

manner and with this show they are struggling up against the constant presence of cameras and constant presence of everyone knowing everything about everyone else all the time while also having to manufacture natural moments for max katie to wander into the backyard of the bodens for them to have a little teta teta tet in an art gallery off of the main uh party area of a charity ball

it's kind of hard to do both, you know, like, and also I think what you're responding to is the fact that like,

Cape Fear is... The previous Cape Fears are smaller, not just because they are either a slim pulp novel or, you know, a two-hour movie, but smaller in the sense that Max Cady isn't a cause celeb in the way that he is on the show and probably would be in contemporary 2026, where everything that he does is broadcast online and in the news media.

And I think the show does a good faith effort to bring some of that fanfare and focus to the world.

But then it's also like...

it's a little discordant then.

This is the biggest thing that ever happened.

And then Amy Adams is shocked that he's there in front of her.

But then he also just takes the mic from her at a large public gathering wearing a beautiful linen suit, which I guess is standard DSU when you get out of the Georgia penitentiary system.

It's both big and it's trying to be big and small at the same time in the way that it's also trying to be short and shocking and also long, serialized and expansive at the same time.

That's a central tension that a lot of these better shows and worse shows have fallen prey to it than this version of Cape Fear.

17 years ago.

I actually like the tone.

And I think that there's an element of it that is just profoundly campy.