Katie Dippold writes comedies that keep something frightening within reach, and for a decade the scares and the jokes took turns rather than sharing scenes. Widow's Bay is where they finally do, and it is the best thing she has written.
Fi1m perspective
The best hour of Paul Feig's Ghostbusters (2016) is four women alone in a lab with a machine none of them has switched on before. Nobody is explaining the plot. They are talking over each other, being clever and petty and pleased with themselves, and the ghosts can wait. That is Katie Dippold's writing where it is most comfortable: people in a room, a strange object, the conversation doing the work. Her trouble, for years, began when the strange object needed rules.
She came up through improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and sketch on Mad TV, then wrote on Parks and Recreation from 2009 to 2013, and the habits show. She writes ensembles, and she trusts a character's turn of phrase over a set piece. The Heat (2013) began as a spec script and became her first feature, with Feig directing; Ghostbusters was their second film together, co-written with him. Snatched followed in 2017. Then, in Haunted Mansion (2023), she started putting the dead in the same scenes as the jokes, and the film could not stop pointing at them. LaKeith Stanfield's widower has a good, sad reason to be in a house full of people who cannot leave, and the script states it in half an hour and spends the next ninety minutes labelling the furniture. A shame, because the idea was sound.
Widow's Bay (2026), which she created and ran, is the first time the two halves hold together. With Hiro Murai directing, the humour sits next to the unease instead of taking a break from it; the town still has its own business to attend to when the supernatural walks in. Matthew Rhys and Kate O'Flynn lead an ensemble worth caring about. We were caught out more than once by how quickly a scene stopped being funny, and we liked being caught out, because the island should not feel manageable. The old fault has not gone, though. Dippold and her writers build a mythology with more rules than the story needs, and keeping track of them sometimes costs more attention than the characters get back.
By her own account the early script was mostly jokes and short on tension, and the revisions were the making of it. A second series is on its way. "Season two is about how everything is great on the island and there’s nothing to worry about," she has said. We hope she is lying. We also hope she loses a rulebook or two on the crossing.
Biography
Katie Dippold is an American screenwriter. She was born on 10 January 1980 in Freehold Township, New Jersey, and graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in journalism.
She began her television career writing for Mad TV before joining the writing staff of Parks and Recreation in 2009. Her feature credits include The Heat (2013), Ghostbusters (2016), Snatched (2017) and Haunted Mansion (2023). She created and is showrunner of the series Widow's Bay (2026).
Dippold has received Primetime Emmy nominations and won an American Comedy Award for the screenplay of The Heat.
