Temple of Geek’s Maria Akhtar sits down with Production Designer Steve Arnold to discuss his Emmy-nominated work on the hit series Widow’s Bay. Steve dives into how his personal roots in the Pacific Northwest inspired the show’s setting, the intricate process of building 25 stage sets, drawing homage to classic horror like Jaws and The Shining, and the balance between comedy, horror, and set engineering.

The atmosphere of an isolated island town requires more than standard set decoration; it relies on lived experience and geographic nuance. Production designer Steve Arnold drew heavily from his own family history to establish the setting for Widow’s Bay. Reflecting on his personal background, Arnold shared: “My ancestors settled on an island in the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest… My parents were born on this island, and we still have beach property… I spent a lot of time on this island, and I have kind of a special knowledge of what it’s like on a somewhat remote small town”. He noted that this upbringing instilled an understanding of what locals call “island time where things take their own time to happen. Everything is kind of very plodding in a way”.

Avoiding Modern Connectivity in Widow’s Bay

Translating this sense of isolation to the screen required avoiding modern infrastructure. Unlike mainland Massachusetts towns connected by prominent highways, the roads on Widow’s Bay were envisioned as isolated thoroughfares, paved or dirt, that go nowhere beyond the island. Discussing location challenges, Arnold explained: “In Massachusetts… there’s always a highway that connects everything… And I wanted to get away from that feel of… this connectiveness that would be lost when you were on an island, where the highway doesn’t go anywhere really”. To capture this off-grid, self-contained feeling, Arnold scouted locations that avoided busy contemporary streets, repurposing a former auto repair shop into a remote convenience store.

Preserving Architectural Lore

Architectural preservation played another critical role in shaping the town’s personality. Drawing inspiration from places where resources are carefully conserved, Arnold noted: “When you think of a place like Cuba, where it’s been limited to what can be brought in, and you have to kind of make do with what you’ve got and keep repairing things and keep using things past their… sell-by date”. He dressed the town with older vehicles, dial phones, tube TVs, and typewriters to keep it “away from as much modern things as possible”. Additionally, East Coast architectural history, where residents “tend to really cherish the old historicness of those buildings,” provided a natural foundation for a town rich in lore.

Recreating Settlements

To build the earliest 1700s iteration of the settlement, the production team bypassed overly polished historical museums like Old Sturbridge Village. As Arnold observed, museum villages often feature a “conglomeration of different periods”. Instead, they relocated modular shed structures to a historic farm to build a rudimentary settlement. “I really wanted to push it into the primitiveness that you would have in a place like Jamestown or one of those early settlements,” Arnold stated, creating a deep-rooted historical layer for the series.

All 10 episodes of Widow’s Bay Season 1 are now streaming on Apple TV+.