Director Hiro Murai Re-Ups FX First-Look Deal as His New Apple Horror-Comedy ‘Widow’s Bay’ Debuts: ‘It Felt Nostalgic, But Without Getting Mushy’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Prolific TV director and producer Hiro Murai found himself in the eye of a storm, literally, while making Apple TV’s new horror-comedy series “Widow’s Bay.”

“Without spoilers, there’s a lot of storm work coming up in the season that, on paper, was always really intimidating to me, just because those things are really hard to simulate and do practically,” Murai told Variety in an interview ahead of the show’s three-episode premiere Wednesday. “But we built it in a way that I was very happy with the results. It was a pain, but it was a really fun thing to try to nail. It was such a large-scale production tasked to set an entire episode inside of a storm.”

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“Widow’s Bay” stars Matthew Rhys as Mayor Tom Loftis, leader of the titular quaint island town 40 miles off the coast of New England. It’s a struggling community where there’s no wifi, spotty cellular reception and superstitious locals who believe their island is cursed. And, unfortunately for Loftis, once he finally gets tourists coming to town, it turns out his citizens’ suspicions were right.

Murai got involved in the show when creator Katie Dippold approached him with a spec script she’d submitted to land her job of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” which she had been sitting on for more than a decade.

“This is something that she’s been holding on to for a really long time, but with all the adventurous half-hour shows that were coming out in the last 10 years, she kind of restructured it and tried to rebuild it in a different way,” Murai said.

In his first conversations with Dippold about “Widow’s Bay,” Murai — who is best known for his work on FX‘s “The Bear” and his long professional relationship with Donald Glover for projects including FX’s “Atlanta,” and Amazon’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” TV series and short film “Guava Island” — was already on board with the show’s unique tone.

“The idea of combining horror and comedy has always been interesting to me. It’s something that we played with a little bit on ‘Atlanta,'” Murai said. “I’ve heard other people say this before, but I do think horror and comedy are weirdly connected. It’s about milking tension, and how do you puncture that tension? But it’s also really hard to do well. I think sometimes horror and comedy can undermine each other. If the horror is not serious, then you’re not really, actually scared. And if it’s too scary, it’s kind of taken away from the comedy.”

That “challenge” at the center of “Widow’s Bay” was “really exciting” for Murai.

“Katie’s script was so unique, I just hadn’t read anything that felt like that,” Murai said. “It felt like real people who have gone through real things, but it also felt like it was touching on an older era of television. Something about the town hall structure and this workplace environment. And it felt nostalgic, but without getting mushy.”

While the 10-episode “Widow’s Bay” was picked up by Apple TV, Murai’s TV home remains FX Networks: the producer and director confirmed exclusively to Variety that he has recently re-upped his first-look deal with the Disney-owned brand through his Chum Films production banner, which he launched in February 2025 alongside producing partner Carver Karaszewski.

“Hiro has the rare ability to tell stories that feel deeply intimate while also resonating on a broader cultural level — all while pushing the medium forward,” FX Entertainment president Nick Grad said in a statement to Variety. “His curiously, generosity and fearlessness as a storyteller make him a natural fit for FX, and we are proud to continue to be his creative home.”

Murai says he’s continued to stick with the John Landgraf-led FX because of their approach to making TV in a very turbulent climate for the industry.

“TV is such a strange format because it takes so many people to build the ecosystem where a show can thrive,” Murai said. “And execs and the kind of network point of view is very much sort of inextricable from that. And I think the way FX approaches their collaborations with artists is very artist-forward. I think they build around the passion and intent of the artist, and so I’ve just always really appreciated that about them. I started in television with FX so I learned how to put together a TV show with them. There’s a sense of loyalty and nice feelings around that, too.”

As “Widow’s Bay” launches, Murai already has several other titles in the works — but none he can talk about in detail just yet.

“We’re working on a few different projects and they’re in different pilot stages, in different genres,” Murai said. “One is a grounded sci-fi project. One is more of an experimental half-hour comedy. We’re always talking about a few different things, we just don’t know what will bubble to the surface first.”

Murai says his early days in TV working on “Atlanta” really shaped how he approaches these future projects and why he doesn’t feel constrained to the age-old TV standard of a one-hour drama vs. half-hour comedy.

“‘Atlanta’ is a half-hour format and it’s sort of structured like a sitcom, in a way,” Murai said. “But at the time, I didn’t really know what the expectation out of a half-hour comedy was. When we were making it, it was very much sort of an ignorance-is-bliss situation where we were doing things that were exciting to us, and then we just tried to make it fit the half hour format. So I learned on that show how stretchy and elastic that format is. As long as it’s an interesting story and has interesting characters, you can kind of get away with anything.”

As for his current inspiration, he’s a big fan of Tim Robinson’s HBO comedy “The Chair Company” (and Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave” at Netflix) and has been recently re-watching a The WB classic: “Dawson’ Creek.”

Murai sees it as “a little 2000s nostalgia, but it’s also a meta teen drama that felt very of its time,” adding: “And just as a cultural artifact, it’s been really fun to go back to. I was in college when the show was on.”